Government Bloodhounds
by xahra99
Summary: Summary: Seifer comes out from Time Compression, drinks a lot, and gets chased into northern Trabia by a lot of very angry Galbadians. Quistis is sent to rescue him. Eventually SeiferQuistis, for now just Seifer vs. Quistis. Illustrated!
1. Chapter One:Trouble

**Government Bloodhounds**

Chapter One

_He's never been far from trouble_

_He lives an inch from his demise_

_Pushes his luck right to the edge_

_Pulls the bull over your eyes…_

John Gorka: Trouble

_"After the Garden's gone, the SeeD hunt will begin. I"ll be Edea"s bloodhound and hunt down every one of your kind."_

Seifer Almasy: Final Fantasy Eight

Seifer Almasy stared at the map.

"Damn."

He flipped the map the other way up for what seemed like the fortieth time that day

Nope, must have been right ways up the first time.

_Fuck. I really am lost. Serve me right for buying a map from that crazy little street dealer over the slice-n-fry joint in Marduk. Damn, if I ever get out of here I'm going to find my gunblade and shove it right up that little creep's….._

Ignoring the fact that his discovery of the map's errors had just significantly reduced his chances of ever seeing civilisation again, let alone that particular street vendor, he continued trudging through the snow, swearing under his breath.

Today looked like being another wonderful day. Just one more in the legions of really shit days he'd had since leaving the city.

He'd heard that some more religiously inclined people considered good fortune to be Hyne smiling on them. Seifer knew She was definitely doing something on him, but it certainly wasn't smiling.

He was fed up of running. It seemed like years since he'd left the city…He wasn't at all sure of the actual date, but from the steadily-decreasing temperature and shortening days he figured it had to be at least a month, month and a half.

He grinned. That was fucking good. Of course, there had been a few close shaves, some so close as to be almost suicidal, but right now he wasn't thinking about that.

A faint crunching sound came from the frosty dead leaf litter off to the right. Freezing on the spot (in more ways than one) Seifer's hand slipped unconsciously under the lapel of his heavy winter coat to grip the hilt of a hidden knife. Muscles taxed from the cold slipped fluidly into a practised fighting crouch.

Focusing on the spot from which the sound had come, he drew the knife.

_Damn. Fucking squirrels. Oh well…food's food.._

The knife zipped across the clearing and buried itself in the unfortunate twitching corpse of a squirrel that, until two seconds ago, had had nothing more serious to worry about than the next acorn.

_Not much meat on that._ Seifer resisted the temptation to boot the little furry critter half way across the forest in the manner of a football.

He hated squirrels. They didn't even taste like chicken. And he really hated trees. Through two months of walking through Northern Trabia, he'd decided that trees were only good for two things. Hiding in, and burning.

He wished he had his gunblade. Or even his familiar tattered dragonleather coat that wouldn't have stood a gnat"s change in Hell against the fierce, biting cold.

That first day out of Time Compression in the hills outside Marduk, Hyperion and the old coat had folded into a surprisingly small bundle as he slipped them into a trash bag and sealed the mouth neatly with duct tape. Buried like his past, he'd thought at the time.

Apparently that hadn't been the case.

Seifer had come out from Time Compression two months after the end of the Sorceress' War; dazed,bewildered and still holding onto Hyperion like grim death. He had never thought he'd be glad that a newspaper had been the first thing he picked up. The paper had been stiff with dirt and sodden with rainwater. He couldn"t read half the words, but he didn"t have to. Just a badly copied picture; on the back page. His only formal Garden photograph, three years ago, squeezed into the stiff woollen formal cadet uniform with eyebrows meeting in the familiar scowl.

"_WANTED: SEED CADET SEIFER ALMASY, IN CONNECTION WITH WAR CRIMES IN THE SECOND SORCERESSES WAR. INFORMATION RECEIVED LEADING TO THE ARREST OF CADET ALMASY WILL BE REWARDED._"

There was a description, at the bottom underneath the headline and photo. Seifer didn"t bother to read it. Hell, he already knew what he looked like. And below that, an address and phone number in weeping black ink. Not Balamb Garden. A Galbadian code. And Seifer didn't even want to think about what that meant.

But the paper was Trabian. At least he knew where he was. And when. The date showed up clearly on the front; two months after when he thought he'd first gone into time compression. Or sometime about that, anyway. He hadn't exactly been checking the date during the wars.

He"d known when the sorceress lost, somehow, even in time compression. Like a thread snapping, like the time when you realise an old wound has at last healed cleanly and you can move without pain.

It felt like he'd been able to see clearly for the first time in months.

_Oh, well. Have to sort that out as soon as possible._

He looked around. There was no one, just bleak stony hillsides, the odd sheep, and trees, their leaves just falling. And what looked like a town or a city, far off in the distance.

A few minutes aimless walking led him to a pitted earth track, worn by hooves and the odd bootprint. A peeling sign said "Marduk: Five miles." Someone had scrawled crude graffiti across it _"So funny"_ and a little cartoon of a smiling head and hands.

LOST, Fuujin would have said. STUPID.

Towns meant people. But they also meant food, and shelter, and something to drink, and a way of finding out what the hell had just happened. And exactly where he was, which hopefully was about as far away from Galbadia as he could get here.

Seifer looked down at himself. He was fucking freezing. Warm clothes that didn"t immediately shout "_Sorceress' Knight_" would be a great idea right now. And some money.

He started to walk towards the city. There was nothing else to do. The trail wound through a confusing mosaic of hummocks and dales, hidden in places by thornbushes and caked with sheepshit.

The sheep fled.

_Deja fucking vu_, thought Seifer.


	2. Chapter Two:Hello City

Chapter 2

_Hello city_

_You made an enemy in me…_

Barenaked Ladies, Hello City

_Twelve months later: Marduk City._

Seifer spent most of his time in a tiny rented flat with the smell of grease and old dirt floating up from the diner below and water dripping through the ceiling. Better this way, the solitude, and no one heard him when he woke, sweatcold and crying or screaming from the odd dreams that came almost every sober night. He preferred it with no one else around to hear, to ask questions and ask well-meant but empty comfort.

Anyway if he drank beyond a certain point he didn't dream. Most of his time was lost inside a bottle or four of vodka, if he'd just got paid for a job, or the rotgut local moonshine that smelled like nail polish if he was running out of money. When he remembered between the jobs and the bottles of deep, blissful forgetfulness, he shoved a few gil in an envelope and stuffed it through the landlord"s door.

The jobs. When you came right down to it there were only so many things a trained mercenary on the run from the law with no identification, no money and nowhere else to go could do. And Seifer had too much pride for the most obvious. Luckily, in the underground labyrinth that was the fifth level of Marduk, there were always people with annoying little obstacles that they would pay to have removed.

He'd hoped that life would pass him by while everyone forgot and assumed he was dead or gone or lost or maybe just mythical, but things hadn't panned out quite like that.

And meanwhile his life crept on, endless merging cycles of sleeping and drinking and trying not to dream and eating (when he remembered) cheap fast food. Sometimes someone would phone him or a slip of paper would be passed to him in a bar or via various anonymous mail accounts and drop boxes around the city and he"d go out and kill someone or just really, really hurt them. When he came back he'd just drink some more and throw his bloody clothes in a trash bag into some Dumpster.

He'd thought it would go on until maybe he drank himself to death, something which had so far refused to happen, though not from want of trying. Or one night he'd go out as normal, only someone else would be waiting who'd be that much faster. And then twenty years and Hyne only knew how many mistakes would all end cleanly and quickly in surprise and pain and a quick explosion of blood.

Six months. It had all gone by so quickly.

And then one day it all changed.

On the morning in question Seifer had been walking down one of the main streets in Marduk City, fourth level. (no stopping if you value your life, money, virginity and any small valuables you happen to have on your person) on his way to check on one of his pickup points.

It really was a shithole. He"d read in a tourist booklet months ago that Marduk was a city that had been founded long ago in a more bucolic age on a small plot of land between two rivers. The city architects had dealt with the problem of expansion as more and more people moved in by building streets in tunnels straight down into the rock. They"d won several important architectural awards and solved the population problem, at least on paper, but the architects had failed to overlook one very important point, namely that nobody was too keen to inhabit underground housing with no natural light, terminal rising damp and piped air. So the houses got sold at rock bottom prices and they"d been home to the poor, the desperate, and incurably criminal ever since they"d been put up.

The city kept tunnelling down, and in time the lower levels of Marduk, from the relatively respectable second, down to the suicidal not-on-your-life seventh level where all the maintenance equipment, sewers and water pumps were kept, developed their own hierarchy. Rumour had it even the maintenance workers down there wore mail vests.

Seifer kicked aside an empty can. Luckily he hadn"t had to go down there much…..yet. Mostly his business took him above the fourth level, because people who had enough money to hire killers usually had enough cash to own a decent flat with fresh air and a view of something nice. Hyne, but he hated it in the lower levels. The piped air and water tasted of sulphur and other peoples' body odour. The light was provided by dim fluorescent bulbs that were supposed to last ten years without needing changing but instead rarely lasted ten minutes due to the frequent attentions of small boys with stones and residents using them for target practice.

It was funny how you never really appreciated things like fresh air until they were gone, he thpught, then shrugged. But the rent was cheap and the overcrowded slums offered the opportunity to hide in a crowd used to ignoring things that didn"t concern them.

He kept walking.

A woman with long brown hair and a tatty jacket that had been fashionable ten years ago in Balamb turned as he came up behind her. She gave him a startled double-take before she turned round and fled in the opposite direction like a frightened rabbit,

Weird. Maybe he'd had to beat up her husband or something.

He got half a mile down the road before he noticed an old man getting into one of the electric taxis at the side of the road staring at him over the door in a painfully obvious _I'm–trying-to-pretend-I'm-not-looking-at-you-and-failing-miserably _way. He was tempted to slam the door on the guy"s nose as he walked past but heroically managed to pass up the temptation. Besides, going up and saying something like _"You"re looking at me in a funny way"_ would attract waay too much attention, of exactly the wrong kind. He settled for glaring at him and grinned as the man jumped into the cab and slammed the door as if an ifrit was on his tail.

Seifer turned into the main street leading to the elevator system. It was wrong. Something was wrong here, and he didn't know what it was. And all his instincts, honed by years of SeeD training and only slightly dulled by one year of bitterness and alcohol abuse, were screaming that he better find out, and quick.

His growing suspicions were only confirmed by a woman several metres down the street. She looked him hard in the eye and then backtracked rapidly, pushing her child in front of her until they both disappeared into one of the neon-lit doorway of the many cheap restaurants that lined the street.

The first time could've been an accident; mistaken identity; whatever. Second time; a coincidence, maybe. Third time…something was happening, and he didn't intend to be here when the shit hit the fan.

And, unless he was mistaken, someone had been following him since the last crossroads.

Seifer pretended to study the rent notices and brightly coloured whorehouse calling cards in the window of the newsagents without looking round and the faint footsteps behind slowed and stopped. He pulled the cap he was wearing slightly further over his face and yanked down the brightly patterned bandanna he'd tied beneath it to cover his scar. No point in asking for trouble. And he might as well take the opportunity to find out what the fuck was going on.

Spinning and checking his wrist like he was late for some appointment, Seifer set off at a fast walking pace down one of the side alleys. He'd pawned his watch some weeks before, but the guy following him didn"t know that. The sound of the following footsteps, growing louder away from the bustle of the main route, paused and then turned after him.

He took a right, then left and left again, just to make sure he really was being tailed. The man followed. He wore cheap soft-soled trainers, from the sound of it. A big guy, but Seifer thought he could probably take him if he was quiet. He pretended to check the time again and a careful flick of the wrist made the small knife he always wore concealed in his coat sleeve drop down into his palm.

Seifer sped up and then turned another sharp left. He heard the man behind walk slightly faster to keep him in sight. At the next corner he stopped as if to unlock the door of a closed derelict shop, rattling a handle, and then crept as silently as he could with steel-capped boots onto the rusting metal fire escape just above the ripped and peeling shop awning, crouching down. He watched the man following pause, then cross the empty street to poke his head into the shadowy shop interior before he vaulted the railing and crashed through the canopy. Seifer's weight hit the man in a tangle of damp rotting canvas and he saw his shocked face for a moment before he hauled him up through a fistful of fabric and slammed him against the wall. Something metallic skittered across the concrete. He heard a sharp crack as the guy's skull hit the brickwork and pulled back a little. He didn't want to kill him, after all. At least, not yet.

A pale cloud of brick dust floated in the air, making the man he held cough. With his arm levered across the man"s throat, Seifer flipped the knife out of his palm and pushed it hard behind one ear against the carotid artery that pulsed in his prey's throat.

"Just what the fuck do you think you"re doing?"

The man in his grip pointed frantically to his face, which was turning a nasty shade of purple. Seifer cautiously lifted his arm but kept the knife pressed to his neck

"I…..have money. Drugs…."

"Keep it. I"m not interested. Now why were you following me?"

The man twisted and began to gasp out hurried excuses and explanations ….he only wanted to find somebody to ask the way, he thought Seifer was someone else, he just…

Seifer pressed the sharp blade of the knife harder against the man"s bull neck. "Yes? Do you think I'm stupid?"

The man grunted in reply. He flicked his arm up and chopped Seifer on the wrist with the side of his hand. The knife spun from Seifer's hand and clattered on the concrete. He snarled and flicked the second knife out from his left sleeve, forcing the man's head back and kneeing him in the balls as well for good measure.

"That was bloody stupid. If I hadn"t been pissing my life away in this dump for the last twelve months you"d be dead right now. Luckily I've decided to be nice. Just answer my questions and maybe you won"t end up in pieces. Small ones."

The man decided that cowardice was the better part of valour. "Help! Heelp!"

"Shut UP." Seifer slammed the guy harder against the wall until the rest of the canopy threatened to collapse "Like anyone"s going to bother in this shithole. They'll just shut their windows and pretend they can"t hear anything. I know. I've seen it. Hell, I"ve done it. Now are you going to tell me what in Hyne's name is going on here or shall I just cut your throat right now?"

He heard the cautious opening of a door behind him and then the hasty slam of door and shutters as someone saw what was happening and decide he didn't want to have any of it, thank you very much, whatever was going on.

"Like I said, just what the fuck is going on?"

The man lifted his arm slightly and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Seifer snatched it out of the air with his left hand, bringing the knife farther in to cover the guy's throat.

This picture was almost identical to the paper he"d seen a year ago. Except this one was in colour, cheaply printed and bore the obvious marks of being in the man"s pocket for some time. WANTED: SEED CADET SEIFER ALMASY, IN CONNECTION WITH WAR CRIMES DURING THE SECOND SORCERESS' WAR…..

"There was a sixty thousand gil reward. They're all over the place. It"s not just these –there's other ones. In black and white. But they"re not offering a reward" He coughed. "I..needed…the money."

"Did it say who put them up?"

The man shrugged, or as best he could with Seifer"s knife across his throat. "I don"t know! But it is you, isn't it. I was right! I saw you on the vidscreens with your bitch sorceress!"

"Shut. Up," grated Seifer. Didn"t this guy know how to the hell to behave when someone else was holding all the cards?, he thought. He flicked the point of the knife upwards, sawing neatly through the base of the man"s ear.

"Aaagh!"

"Who WERE they?" Seifer was getting worried. They weren't in the best of areas and with the noise this guy was making someone was bound to be along in a minute. All it needed was for a few other guys to have seen one of those fucking posters and he"d be in some deep shit.

"I"m dead anyway."

"How right you are."

"They said they were SeeDs!"

Seifer raised an eyebrow "You"re fucking lying."

"I saw them on the vidscreens too! Black uniforms, right? With real gold on them. And there was this guy on the screen…Dark, y' know…. pimp coat, looked like a girl? He was the one who wasn't offering a reward! Spouted some kind of shit about the public duty!"

Squall. Fuck. Lucky the bastard was too tight to offer real money. "So who were the other guys?" He had one hell of a suspicion .This was not good. He pressed the knife upwards harder, slicing away a bit more of the remaining flesh and cartilage. "What about the other ones? The ones who gave you this?"

"Aaagh! They're Galbadians! Said they wanted you alive! Said they'd pay for it! Said they've got all the gates sealed off! Said you'll never get out in one piece!"

A number of unpleasant possibilities were clamouring for attention in Seifer"s head as to what exactly the Galbadians wanted him alive for. Or what Balamb Garden wanted him for after all this time. None of them were good. A city was a great place to hide unless some asshole did something like this and then you had a million staring eyes that never slept. Sixty thousand gil was as much money as the average Trabian saw in a lifetime.

The man smiled as much as a conspiratorial smile as he could manage. "Want some papers? Guaranteed to get you through the checkpoints"

"Which checkpoints? You"d be going through with me. In front."

The man flicked a glance at the knife. His smiled faded and he said nothing.

There was the noise of voices and feet from one of the surrounding alleys and the guy grunted and brought his knees up to try and kick Seifer in the balls. Seifer twisted to try and see who was behind them. The man he held cannoned into him, his left hand reaching for something hidden inside his jacket as Seifer's head snapped round. He reflexively brought the knife across in a long sweep that sliced through the soft flesh of the man"s throat and sent a spray of blood arcing into the dusty gloom inside the shelter of the canopy and steps. The guy's breath exhaled in a wet hiss. The voices got closer.

Cursing, Seifer grabbed the heavy falling body by the waist and dragged them both into the close shadow of the awning, holding his breath and hoping whoever was coming was blind or deaf or both. The voices got closer and then receded, drunk and arguing loudly.

_Thank Hyne. Not even the right street. Stupid_.

He let the body flop into the dust and pulled the curtain of torn fabric over the steps to enclose the front of the store in a gloomy stinking tent. The police'd be even more suspicious if they found a dead guy who hadn't been robbed. No doubt someone on the streets would cheerfully have relieved him of the chore, but Seifer hadn"t stayed alive in Marduk for a year by taking chances. He rifled the body and found that the man hadn"t been carrying much. Just a gun in his pocket he hadn"t had time to draw when Seifer jumped him, scattered with some bullets on the concrete. An ID wallet identified him as David Matthews, Trabian, twenty four, single, a card-carrying member of Twentieth Century Flicks Video Store, Woo Hung Lee's Emporium of Marital Aids and Exotica, and an organ donor. Nice to know some kid somewhere was going to get a nice new pair of kidneys. The wallet bore the insignia of one of Marduk's less prominent street gangs.

Seifer flicked the wallet into one of the many pockets of his dirty and now bloodstained coat. Never knew when another ID might be useful. The photograph on the wallet didn't look much like Seifer, but then it didn't look much like the dead man either.

He lashed out at the door of the empty shop which splintered like balsa wood. It was the work of a moment to drag the cooling corpse inside through the shattered planks and settling dust. There was a chipped filthy enamel sink just inside the door and a twist of the cold tap gave a flood of viscous green goo that was almost but not entirely unlike water. It tasted richly of chemical waste products as he sluiced it over his streaked face and coat. The blood stuck to the faded leather jacket like glue and eventually he just gave up and exchanged his coat for the dead man"s. He'd chuck it later.

Finally Seifer dragged the lax body through the dust to a tiny room at the back of the shop that by the look of it had been used for storage. There hadn't been much blood after the first explosion and the trail left behind in the dust was easily obliterated by ten minutes fast sweeping and a damp rag torn from his shirt.

Hopefully no one would even stop to notice until the corpse started to smell. He considered the idea of burning the evidence, but decided against it. Fire was a real hazard in the tiny overcrowded slums, and he had no desire to add mass murder to his not inconsiderable list of crimes.

_Time to get out of here._

He dragged the remains of the front door dragged shut with a creak of fading hinges, fighting the splinters torn from it when he'd broken the lock to get in.

As he walked away he thought of the quickest way back to the flat. He took care to pocket the fallen gun and pull the awning down further over the front of the shop. Not much to worry about, assuming the guy over the road decided not to grow some bollocks and call the enforcers.

A few minutes later Seifer raced up the stairs to his rented room, taking two at a time and throwing open the door which made a large chunk of plaster fall off the ceiling and narrowly miss his head. He slammed it quickly and leant on it, breathing fast. He dragged his hands slowly down his face, sliding to the floor.

"Shit."

He looked around.

Even Seifer admitted the place was a dump. The nature of his jobs advised caution and made him move around a lot, but in two months the only homely touches it had acquired were a pile of empty vodka bottles in one corner and a ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts in the other. A few girly mag posters decorated the walls and a secondhand mattress and sleeping bag sprawled across the floor. A leaning chipboard wardrobe propped up the wall, festooned with more posters and filled with a change of clothes or two and a rucksack. The only window looked out onto a brick wall and had bars on, either to discourage all but the most terminally enthusiastic of robbers or (Seifer's pet theory) to prevent people jumping out of them and making a mess on the pavement outside the shop. Sometimes when he got really drunk, he"d forget that they didn't open. The room never seemed to have enough air in it, and what was there smelt of old blood and burning plastic and the death of a thousand dreams.

He rummaged through the wardrobe and started stuffing things in his rucksack; three or four changes of clothes, the sleeping bag and the only map he had (a streetmap of Marduk and the surrounding area with the local bars marked in lurid pink circles.) Lighter and cigarettes. A couple of rounds of ammunition. His gun and knives. A last full vodka bottle.

Damn. Twelve months here, one lousy year of his life, and this was all he had?

None of it was going to be much good on the run. And where to run to? Assuming he could ever make it out of the city, there were really two options, south or north. Now this, he thought, was what they didn"t teach you in the SeeD manual. '_How to escape from an unknown number of enemies with no legal papers, no friends, no maps, and no assistance.'_ If it'd said those kind of things, he thought, instead of all those boring rules, he might have read it.

Maybe he could go back to Garden and come up with some excuse. "Sure, yeah, I had amnesia. I've been wandering for years all over Galbadia, helping small orphan children and cats stuck up trees and fighting for righteous causes."

_Instead of holing up in a slum and killing people for money_.

He snorted. Mmm. Going back to Garden was out. He could just turn himself in, but to be honest he wasn't sure they"d be any more pleased to see him than the Galbadians would be. Seifer had been through all this before anyway. Better to at least try and make some kind of living for himself than going begging back to Garden. If he even got that far without someone recognising him and deciding to raise a lynch mob. Hyne, people had been executed for worse things than trying to take over Garden and kill all the SeeDs. Plus, his memories of the wars before time compression were vague, at the least.

And he really didn"t fancy his chances of going up to Cid and saying "Yeah….I wasn't really sure of what I did during the war…do you think I might have screwed your wife?"

There was always suicide, well, that WAS suicide, but he'd always wanted to go out fighting. Or failing that, on top of a huge mountain of money and taking a beautiful woman"s bra off with his teeth. When he was ninety-four. And that was a fucking joke. Most SeeDs didn't live past their thirties, but the ones who survived past that just got tougher, like oak.

So, either Garden, north to the mountains, south or jumping off something high. He almost laughed. No choice at all, really, just like so much else in his life.

_Might as well choose, though_.

He fished a bottle out from the mountain of empties taking up half the floor space.

_Note, take bottles out to the recycler before fleeing. There must be enough to buy a ticket out of here_. Or maybe he'd just leave them. He owed several weeks rent as it was but so far the landlord had been too scared to collect in person, resorting instead to irate and then pleading letters under the door whenever Seifer was out.

Seifer drained the bottle, which turned out to be some kind of godawful peachflavoured spirit, and flipped it on its side on the floor. He bent over and flicked it with his foot, watching it spin and feeling the last dregs of the spirit working their way into his stomach. It spun fast, circling with a sound reminiscent of the last plate on the floor after the china shelves just got knocked over.

The bottle spun slower as he watched, then came to a rest. The neck pointed north. The base pointed south. Shit, he thought_. I forgot to decide which was which._

What the hell. He'd have a better chance north anyway. It was well past time to go. He'd already outstayed his welcome here. Lifting his pack from the floor, he slammed open the door and walked out onto the street, heading for the nearest stairway system down. The key made a faint clanging noise as he vindictively chucked it down a manhole. It was dark outside; the usual depressingly seedy panorama. Dripping water reflected from puddles on the floor and neon signs sparkled luridly in the artificial dimmed lights. No one gave him a second glance, which was just as well. No soldiers, either, though he did see what looked like another poster from a distance, tacked up in a store window with the phone sex line cards and lost pet ads. He flicked the collar of his coat up just in case, anyway, and pulled the hat and bandanna down.

He made it to the nearest stairwell without incidence. Usually the quickest way was via the lifts spotted around the level, but you needed a permit, which Seifer hadn't got, and which cost money, and there was no chance he'd be able to slip on without one now. Just in case he dragged the dead man's wallet out and rifled through it. Hopefully it"d be a while before a girlfriend or a associate or fuck, even family, bothered to miss him or someone happened to check the old shop and find(and report) his body, but you never knew.

The stairwell gaped wide open in front. It wasn't even an escalator, just a wide, battered flight of chipped heavy plastic stairs with high railings and flickering failing bulbs lighting landings between the flights. It'd take a good walk to get to the top, but that wasn't where Seifer was heading. There were a few people around as he cautiously approached the hole; just a couple of tired workers from the lower levels coming up after a long shift and a small gang of teenage boys with identical flamboyant haircuts, leather jackets striped with gang logos and sweat, who knew trouble when they saw it and kept well away.

So either the Galbadians or Garden didn't know the area or they hadn't gotten anyone down here yet. Maybe they were too busy fighting it out on the upper levels.

_Or I'm about to make one of the biggest mistakes of my life._

_Again._

But he passed thought the entrance and down the first flight without incidence, boots ringing hard echoes on the floor despite how softly he tried to walk. Nobody shouted or shot or called him back. Seifer wasn" quite sure whether to be happy (they might not catch me, I'm going to get out ) or disappointed( just how hard are these guys trying anyway) or wary (maybe they're saving it all up for later or it's a trap...) or just apathetic(I really don't care any more) Had to be a good thing, anyway, for now.. Maybe they were expecting him to do something really stupid, charging into the gates in a motorcycle or taking someone hostage to bargain for leniency… or just hanging on, saving money and resources, hoping maybe some bounty hunter or the police would bring him in…

Seifer almost smiled. The police down here were about as efficient as a dead computer store employee-or he'd never have got away with his assassinations as long as he had. Come to think about it, it was just as well he'd be leaving-sooner or later he might have pissed someone of who cared enough to bring in their own firepower. Some people said that every cloud has a silver lining. In Seifer's twenty-year experience, the silver lining was mostly just more rain.

As he descended, the levels got more downtrodden. Jets of smoke from faulty air-conditioning units steamed from the walls. Wall lights had been ripped from their sockets for salvage, sale or fun. Once or twice he heard rustlings in the shadows and sensed faint movement, but he was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me-enough that no one came near him. In fact he saw nothing at on the way down at all except a couple of whores who slurred a greeting; chewing gum. Their pupils were dilated with the newest designer drug. Seifer could smell the heavy sweet-sour odour of their perfume as he walked by without looking or speaking, always alert. From behind him he heard a shouted swearword and then silence. One of them, he thought, h looked vaguely like Rinoa.

He shivered.

It was so quiet. Creepy, it was so quiet.

The stairwell around him began to look like something from a bad science fiction movie, the kind with people running up the stairs instead of climbing out the door and forgetting to call the pest control. If only they worked. He could have just crawled out in the ventilation ducts and no one would have ever known.

A faded and peeling stencilled sign on the next landing said "6." Just one more to go, then. Level six was the upper maintenance level, with only a few human workers. Doors dotted the landings at intervals, all heavily locked with biohazard signs in eight different languages. _No Entry. Fire Exit Only_. Seifer walked down a couple more levels, looking carefully at the doors, until he came to one with "_Maintenance Personnel Only_!" stencilled on it. It didn't look like it had been opened for years unless you looked carefully.

The door was masked by the graffitied logos of five different gangs. Down in the corner was a tiny scratched cross just by the doorjamb, masked by grease and slime. Seifer grinned silently in the darkness and flicked his knife from a sleeve. He rubbed the knife on the inside of his coat to remove the greasy patina of boot polish and oil he kept smeared upon the blade to stop his knives shining at inappropriate moments. He'd learned early on in his short and undistinguished career as an assassin that you didn"t wear jewellery or polish your shoes or do anything that might shine or squeak or clink to give away your whereabouts until the job had been done. It was a skill that most street people learned early in their lives. Those that didn't, no-one ever found. Well, not all at once.

Silently he tilted the knife under the door, sliding it slowly along the step to cover the whole room inside. No movement was reflected in the dull blade. The room was an indistinguishable haze of blues, blacks, smudges of metal and smears of boot polish.

_Good_, Seifer thought. He rose and levered the knife in the slot of the security card holder.

Nothing.

He swore, and pressed again. The door creaked open with a sound reminiscent of gothic castles. Seifer held his breath. Seeing no one, he slipped through and eased the door quietly shut, alert in the darkness.

Was that a faint movement in the gloom ahead of him? Blue light shimmered on steel.

_Shit._

There was a soft enquiring beep from the shadows, and Seifer relaxed slightly, eyes squinting. He pulled his gun from his coat and stepped out, pulling the cap more firmly over his face to mask his eyes. As the maintenance robot emerged from the shadows Seifer took careful aim and shot it.

Sparks showered from the robot's control panel. Its beeping noises sped up and then slowed to an awful monotone drone before the robot"s head exploded. Sparks and shards of burning metal zipped among the walls. Seifer ducked and threw an arm over his head to protect his eyes. Something whined past his head, nearly taking out an ear, and then everything was silent again except for the distant rumble of machinery.

He hunkered down against the wall to wait, carefully taking stock of his surroundings. He was sitting on a mesh walkway, one of many lining the walls of an immense underground chamber; a weird mix of ancient –looking brickwork and modern industrial fittings. There were many levels above, stocked with machinery and the deceptive human-like figures of maintenance robots going about their business.

Which was, not to put it too kindly, other people's business. The place stank.

He'd known about this route for a while, ever since one of his infrequent explorations of the city, looking for new places to leave messages, hide out and escape detection. After a quick look around, he'd left, crossing the spot off as a dead end, way too smelly and no use. But it might turn out to be just the right thing for leaving the city undetected.

Seifer wondered if exit routes had always been in the back of his mind after all. The disembodied and mangled head of the robot stared mournfully at him until he booted it into the nearest pit of sewage, where it sank with an accusing burp.

_All this time_, he thought_, just trying to forget_. After all, it wasn't really necessary to remember-why bother, when there was always so many people to do it for you, and in such varied detail? Since entering the city Seifer had heard the story of the Sorceress' Wars from a dozen shadowy corners in dusty crowded bars. The gallant SeeDs, saving the world from the hungry clutches of the evil and beautiful sorceress and her traitor sidekick. He"d never stayed to hear the end of any of them.

_It could have been worse_, he thought. _I could have been the comic relief_. Infamy wasn't as good as fame, but sometimes it was better than obscurity.

There was a sound in the shadows, indistinct against the backdrop of mechanical clanks and hisses. He listened carefully and heard muffled human footsteps, too irregular to be a robot's. And no robot ever whistled that badly. He pressed back against the brickwork, trying to become invisible. When you were six feet tall that hardly ever worked, but it didn't have to work forlong. The smoke gouting from the dismantled robot would obscure his outline in the gloom.

He heard swearing as a human engineer turned the corner and saw the steam. He was a small man, tired and unshaven; wearing blue coveralls and an ill fitting worker's bullet proof vest.

"Someone there?" he called.

Seifer froze, hoping the man wouldn't be keen enough to come and man had good reason to be nervous, with some of the gangs that came round here. _Hyne_, he thought, _doesn't this guy read any horror novels_? Stomping along dark smoky corridors saying stupid things like that was a sure way to get yourself eaten by whatever monster had crawled into the ventilation ducts this week.

He saw the glint of light as the man reached into his toolbox and produced a heavy spanner. He stood tensely for a moment while Seifer, half-hidden behind a pillar, waited for him to lose concentration.

After a few seconds he saw the man's attention fade. His gaze slipped from the silent shadows. Seifer imagined that he was mentally criticising himself for being so stupid. The spanner lowered.

Seifer tensed, and lunged. He pushed into the man and ducked as the spanner swept past his head. He swore as it came back round and connected with his forearm and then his hands closed on greasy navy lapels. His grip was tenous, but it was strong enough to hold the maintenance worker still for a second as Seifer punched him in the nose and, as he slumped to the ground, on his chin.

The worker crashed to the ground and lay stilll. Blood oozed slowly from a scalp wound as Seifer ripped his gloves off, shook some feeling into his skinned knuckles and knelt beside the body. He pressed dirty fingers to the pulse in the man's neck. It was regular. The man's face was peaceful. Seifer thanked Hyne he wasn't dead. He was already in enough trouble as it was.

He yanked the clip on ID tag off the man's uniform, turning the plastic wafer over in his hand. It was a cheap identity card with a laser swipe strip along one edge.

Seifer dragged the unmoving body to the door with some difficulty. He kicked it open and pushed the man through. With luck he'd wake up in a few hours with nothing the worse except for a bad headache and maybe all his money and boots gone-because this was Marduk after all, and he could go back up the stairs and find those whores.

One security gate later and five minutes diligent searching along the lower levels produced a manhole, smoking slightly in the metallic tasting artificial air. Seifer knelt down and swiped the card along its base. The swipecard was just another security measure, designed to ensure no rebel elements used the sewers to plant bombs or pollute water supplies. He wondered if anybody would notice if they did.

The manhole opened into a narrow tunnel that must have been at least twelve feet tall. Water dripped and echoed and flowed down the crumbling rotten brickwork-a relic of an earlier age. As Seifer's vision adjusted to the dark he saw a narrow river flowing along the bottom of the tunnel. He pulled a flashlight out of his rucksack, took a trash sack out and wrapped the whole bag in it, tying it on his back and wrapping the torch round his neck. He was pretty sure all his clothes would have to be trashed anyway, except his boots and gloves just because he hadn't got any others. It was a pity, but there was no way he was risking wandering around all this junk in bare feet. _Way to get septicaemia_, he thought. It was going to be hard enough to travel through the woods anyway without having a foot the size of a small pig.

He took a deep breath and swung down onto the crumbling metal rings, dragging the manhole over his head and sliding it back into position. His arm ached like hell where the spanner had caught it. As the manhole clicked back into place he felt a moment's panic and then lost his breakfast as the foul smelling air rolled up in heavy waves.

_Whose bright idea had this been_? he thought.

_Oh. That's right. Mine._

Working as much by feel as by the light of the swinging flashlight hanging round his neck, he made his way down the rusting metal ladder as his boots slipped and fought against the slippery brickwork. Hyne, if he fell… Well, he just wasn't going to think about that. Drowning in sewage had never been on his things to do list anyway.

Seifer finally landed with a soft slurp in the unnameable stuff at the base of the tunnel. The liquid reached up to his waist. For want of a better word he decided to call it "water".

He slipped and stumbled along, following the flow of the water, movements echoing in the dark. Pipes ran along and out from the wall every so often, spouting sewage and liquid at random intervals. This he found out after he walked under one at the exact moment it decided to dump its load and got doused with a thin dark fluid that smelt like chemical residues and petrol. It could have been worse, though, and after that he gave any of the pipes a wide berth. He tried not to think what was going to happen if he found a grille blocking the flow of the pipes. The manholes couldn't be opened from below, another security measure. It was a spectacularly morbid thought, but he thought it anyway. Perhaps even death by liquid sewage was preferable to death by Galbadian, and it might even be quicker.

_I'm going to get out of this_, he thought. _Minus my sense of smell, breakfast and possibly sanity if this goes on much longer._

After a while the pipe he was walking in joined a much larger tunnel where the water just came up to his knees. By the time he reached the exit Seifer had lost count of the times he'd thrown up into the nameless water. It was enough for his throat to burn with acid and his teeth to feel furry. He tried taking the bandanna off his head and wrapping it around his nose and mouth to block out the smell but after the third time of nearly being sick all over it he gave up and tossed it in the water.

_Damn, _he thought. _Why is always carrots_? He hadn't eaten carrots in the last year. Come to think of it, he hadn't eaten much in the last day or two.

There was nothing at the end of the tunnel. Nogrille, no robot security or hidden cameras (unless they were hidden really well) just a circle of light that slowly got bigger and stronger until Seifer could switch his torch off altogether. He blinked in the bright sunlight and hissed as his pupils constricted sharply.

Seifer looked around. He stood in the mouth of a huge pipe. The pipe jutted out several feet over a river, fastflowing and wide. There was no sound behind him except the rushing of the water. The outskirts of the city stretched to his left. It glowed in the half-light as the hundreds of countless law-abiding citizens who hadn"t spent their night crawling through a tunnel full of sewage and were now planning to flee from the authorities got on with their lives.

In Balamb, it would be wake-up call right now. He'd be sleeping in the room he shared with Fuu and Raijin. And the alarm would go off and one of them would stomp it and then eventually someone would crawl out of bed and they'd all race for the showers, and Seifer would get in first because he was the boss, ya know, and either Fuujin would win because she was a girl (and therefore fought dirty) or Raijin would win because he was bigger.

But he'd hated the stupid exams and the lessons on tactics at eight in the morning and Squall and Zell and their stupid gang and the rules that seemed to cover every aspect of their lives. You couldn't fight without taped gunblades or be late for classes or go into town without permission or talk back or use, Hyne forbid, your own initiative in missions. Seifer had never been very good at following those rules. Which was, maybe why he was here, crawling out of a tunnel full of shit, and they were there. Or here, depending on who exactly had been sent to tail him. Anyway, they weren't here right now, and that was the most important thing.

But in the back of his mind there was always something that said: _this is too easy_.

Seifer shrugged it off and put it down to the rare fact that something was going all right for once.

Casting around, he looked for a way down to the riverbank. There was none. The pipe jutted out several metres over the water, festooned with barbed wire at the sides and top. He experimentally kicked the base and was rewarded with a hollow clang. No way to get out through the bottom then. He was going to have to jump in the river.

Seifer shivered.

The water looked brown and cold. It was swollen with rainwater and nameless garbage from the city. He took a deep breath, checked his bag and dived. The dive was more of an unglamorous plop, weighted down with bag and flashlight still round his neck.

He took a deep breath before he went under, but the cold hit him like a wall and pushed the breath from his body. Halfway to the bottom and mostly drowning he realised his mistake and spent an interesting and frantic minute wrestling the flashlight off and ripping the bag from his back to free his arms, Little red and black spots danced in front of his eyes.

When Seifer came to the surface, sucking in lungfuls of air like fine Marduk whisky, the city was barely visible, and he was in the middle of a fastflowing river. His boots dragged at his feet and his clothes pulled him down. He thanked Hyne the river was at least quiet, he was having a job just to stay afloat and breathe.

It took ten minutes more of swimming, or rather trying to float in the right direction, before he finally touched bottom with the toes of his boots. His hands were freezing, clumsy and thick in the cold water and it was hard to move, but and a few seconds later he was lying in the brush at the edge of the trail, with the other flotsam thrown up by the tide, clothes soaking wet and laughing like crazy.

But the laughter had been six weeks ago. They'd been six bad weeks; weeks of learning and running and walking, putting one foot in front of the other mile after mile after mile, freezing in the night and fighting off monsters during the day and always being hunted. He'd seen helicopters a few times, heard the rasp of engines once, and seen five soldiers, the last one thirteen days ago. But they were still after him. He could feel it. _Or maybe, _he thought_, it's all in my imagination. Won't be the first time. I'll be like one of those old guys you hear about, hiding in some remote location years after the war's ended. I'll get out of here in a year's time with a puzzled expression and a beard you could hide rats in._

_If I last that long._


	3. Chapter Three:Michigan Militia

Chapter 3

_A letter to you from where I"ve been holed up_

_In this bucolic agrarian compound_

_One step ahead, just ahead_

_Of the government bloodhounds._

_Moxy Fruvous: Michigan Militia_

The signs were that Seifer was approaching a settlement. There were faint indentations in the snow that looked too well-trodden to be any kind of monster tracks, and some of the tree stumps that poked up from the frosty blanket of the ground had been cut with an axe. As he rounded the ridge he'd been following he saw what looked to be log roofs and smoke drifting up from the skeleton winter canopy in the far distance.

Seifer had only seen five people since starting out two months ago; all of them Galbadian soldiers. Two of them had almost shot him. He'd killed all five of them.

A dog barked, the sounds carrying sharply in the still and freezing air. Seifer stopped, his hand slipping under his coat to the knife concealed there, but as he waited and the sounds got no closer he relaxed slightly and continued on. The game trail he was following north looked like it went right past the nearest cabin, a moss covered roof poking out from the trees at least a mile from the rest of the village. The sensible thing would be to take a wide path around the cabin through the woods, continue on his way, pick up some more food later when he could, and keep going until sunset. He could light a small fire with dry wood so it wouldn"t smoke too much and roast a squirrel. He'd hope for no more snow so the dogs and trackers behind him wouldn't be able to find his trail. The foothills were starting to slope upwards to the high distant ridge of the northern Trabian mountains. All Seifer had to do was time it just right, pray he'd be able to sneak through the troops that were (if they had any brains) stationed there to cut him off and then he"d be safe, at least until the snows melted and the blizzards stopped. By then he could be miles away, even cut back through the mountain passes as soon as the March snows melted. It wasn't much of a plan, and doubtless would have earned him zero marks from Quistis Trepe, but so far it was all he had. All except one squirrel and his weapons and half a backpack of survival gear that was way too lightweight for this climate. _A room would be nice_, he thought. Somewhere to sleep and dry out his clothes and rest there for the night. There was blood on the snow at his feet. Most of it was probably his.

He was halfway down the ridge before he realised what he was doing and slid to a stop.

_This is stupid_, he silently told himself. _You're going to get caught_.

His mind mentally flicked a finger at him.

Seifer tried to rationalise his decision to himself. Hopefully the owner wouldn't be there. He could break into the cabin somehow and just stay there for the night. No one would ever know he'd been there. Hopefully.

With this thought fixed firmly in his mind he continued quietly down the slope and through the trees to the edge of the clearing. He stopped behind a large treetrunk, drew aside some branches and froze as he heard the sound of movement. His breath clouded in the cold air.

The cabin was small and dilapidated. Three of its four walls were completely covered by a huge log pile neatly stacked in a geometric pattern. More wood was heaped against the wall of a half-buried storage cellar slightly in front of the house. A man walked round the corner of the cabin, whistling tunelessly but cheerfully. He hauled a basket half-full of a pile of logs which made a faint crackling sound as he dragged it though the frosty grass.

_Fuck_, Seifer thought. He hated the man instantly. What the hell did he need to chop more wood for, anyway? Why couldn't he just have been out? Was it too much to ask?

He mentally snarled at himself to shut up. Damn. All this silence was getting to him.

But if he was worried about going crazy, then he probably wasn't mad yet.

Seifer watched from the cover of the pines. Should he go, or run? His scar ached and burned in the cold, pulling at chapped, wind-burned skin until he thought he would scream. Without taking his eyes from the man in the clearing, he scooped up a handful of snow and held it to his face. He watched the man pick up an axe from the icy grass. When it came down to it, what did he have left to lose? Just his arms and legs and mind and vital signs and everything you ever knew and whatever was left of his pride?

The man took a firmer hold of the axe and peered distrustfully towards the trees. He looked to be about fifty or so, maybe younger. He was old but weathered, like a twisted piece of wood left out in the rain.

"Vasily? That you?"

Seifer's stomach rumbled in reply. Damn. It had been so long since he'd had something proper to eat. Come to think about it, when was the last time he'd talked to someone? Really talked? Maybe the old man would have food….shelter, information, dry clothes.

_They're just three days behind me_, he thought_, and it hurts to breathe. I'm so tired. Dying would be easier than this. Hyne knows I can't take much more._

He stepped forwards. The paranoid part of his mind screamed and dragged its heels.

Gennady squinted into the dense cover of the trees as he hefted the axe. "Vasily?" he called again. It was far too early in the season for snow lions. Thegame and monsters near the cabins had been hunted out for weeks.

He watched someone walk out from between the trees. "Welcome," he called. "My name's Gennady." He tried hard to keep the surprise from his voice as he saw the stranger's face. Judging from the way the man's expression didn't change, he succeeded.

What the hell was Seifer Almasy doing out here?

Gen had heard rumours of activity down in Marduk and in the lower forests, but that was miles away. One thing was for sure, this could only lead to trouble. And he sure as hell didn't mean for it to be for him.

He arranged his features into a rather forced smile, trying to remember where in Hyne's name he"d put his ex-service revolver. The man in front of him stayed quiet, lingering on the edge of the trees as if uncertain of his reception. Gen tried again, shouting. "Can I help? Are you hurt?"

Seifer shook his head. When he spoke his voice was rough and sounded unused. "I"ve. ..been travelling…I wondered if you had any food? If I could stay the night? " He coughed and spat. "I….was hiking. I got separated. I haven"t been able to find any of my friends."

Gennady looked suitably worried by the transparent lie. "Do you want to call anyone? The nearest phone's some way away." It ws a lie, but Seifer didn't need to know that.

"No…I"m supposed to be meeting them not far from here. I got into a fight. With monsters. I-I can pay."

Gen's face betrayed only slight worry. "Don't worry. Sure, come in. It's not much, but you're welcome for just one night."

Seifer watched warily to make sure the old man had put the axe down. He flexed his wrists and checked the knife concealed in each sleeve, just in case. "Thanks," he said as he followed the man towards the door. He was younger than he"d first appeared, about forty, but tanned and leathered and with the kind of wiry old-man-muscles you got from doing physical work all your life. _Well,_ Seifer thought, _it can't be any picnic living out here._

_I should know._

The house was bigger than it looked from the outside, all warm log walls with a roaring open fire. It smelt of woodsmoke. A mad miscellany of random objects was strewn around the walls and benches. A rifle was pegged in pride of place on the wall. A snow lion's stuffed head hung beside it. Tanned deer pelts hung over the fireplace. Traps hung from the ceiling. There was probably a stuffed alligator in there somewhere, but Seifer couldn't be sure among all the clutter.

The man saw him looking, and shrugged. "Hunting's "bout the only way to keep yourself going round here. Keeps the draughts out, too, the more stuff you got. Sorry-I didn"t catch your name. I'm Gennady. Gennady Ayers. You can call me Gen. Have a seat. And you can put your bag down."

Seifer felt a flicker of panic. "I'm…Dave. David Matthews." He lowered his rucksack down to the floor, wincing a little as the movement pulled on the injured muscles of his arm. He shoved the bag behind his chair. He didn't _think_ the guy was going to go through his things, but he'd been wrong before. Not that he had much stuff to take, of course. If this man lured travellers in to steal all their worldly goods he was going to be disappointed. Unless, of course, he really was in need of a couple of tarps, a wet sleeping bag and a dead squirrel.

Gen nodded. "Pleased to meet you. But you said you had a fight?"

Seifer nodded "Yeah. I….managed to get away, though. It was slow. If you"ve got a first-aid kit?"

"Sure. You"ll have to take off that coat though. Do you do this kind of thing often? You"ve got that scar."

Seifer frowned. He reached up to touch his face and realized that the cold had inflamed his old scar tissue. He tried to sound casual. "That? No. It was from a bar fight. A while ago. I forget about it." He flicked the knives, which had made a brief appearance under the table, back into his coat sleeves and shrugged his coat off. He was painfully aware that his clothes beneath were filthy. The heat on his back from the fire felt good, though. It was the first time he"d been properly warm for weeks.

"Looks like you"ve really been through it," said Gen.

Seifer managed a brief, rueful smile. "Yeah. It was at night. We panicked. Got split up. I fell a ways." _Think student_, he thought. _Think someone who doesn"t know how to fight and who thought it"d be a good idea to go for a little hike in the middle of a forest full of monsters_. David Matthews. A kind of college student name, with a little flat in the city, a couple of big-titted bimbo girlfriends on the go at once and a bunch of jock friends. Didn't sound so bad, at the moment.

The slash down his sleeve had neatly ripped his heavy leather coat and frayed the edges of the couple of jumpers and layers of shirts he'd taken to wearing underneath to keep the cold out. Trails of bloodstained yarn frayed from the edges of the cut. Surprisingly, underneath, the wound wasn't that bad, just a shallow slice with clean edges. "Got any bandages?"

"Sure. That doesn't look so bad. Thought you were going to be missing an arm under all those layers." Gennady laid an open first-aid box and a bowl of water down at his elbow. He gave Seifer a strange look that might have been pity or worry or scorn or nothing at all. "Want a drink?"

"Hyne, yeah," Seifer said. "That would be great." He resisted the temptation to ask for vodka. By the time Seifer had finished cleaning the cut and wrapping the bandage around his upper arm Gen was back with a steaming mug of something that smelled like black coffee and a small bottle of clear liquid.

"Coffee. And a little something else. For medicinal purposes only, of course." He winked. "I distill it myself." He sat down across the table from Seifer and splashed a more than generous helping into Seifer"s cup.

Seifer took a swallow of the coffee. It was thick, unsweetened and black, just the way he liked it. The spirit burned bittersweet fire all the way down to his stomach, warming him from the inside out. Good booze.

"You can stay here tonight, of course. You're welcome. Unless you want to stay longer, get yourself cleaned up?"

"Thanks, but no. I have to meet up with my friends tomorrow. Sure I can find the bad luck I got lost. I"ll be fine." He gave a big, fake smile, starting to relax from the alcohol and warmth, thinking that maybe this was going to work out, that it had been a good idea to come. "Just need to get a shower and a shave when I get back. Term starts soon, ya know."

Gen smiled. "You"re welcome. Call it a good old fashioned gesture of hospitality. Oh, I almost forgot. "He walked over to a cupboard in the corner and started pulling things out onto the table. He finally grunted, flicked a small brown bottle out of the cabinet and towards Seifer, who caught it with his left hand. "Painkillers. For the arm. It looks sore"

Seifer began to protest, but thought better of it. David Matthews wouldn"t turn down medicine. Hyne, he was probably thanking his lucky stars he got out of the big scary woods all right. Probabaly hadn"t been in more than a bar fight in his life. "Thanks" He shook the little white pills onto the table and took three, washing them down with more coffee. Maybe it was his imagination, but the pain began to recede almost straight away. He let a long breath out and began to relax. "You don"t know how glad I am I found this place. Just what is it you do, anyway?"

Gen smiled. " Oh, I hunt a bit. Trap mostly. You'd be surprised how much they'd pay for pelts out there in the city. We're really pretty self-sufficient. You'll have seen the other houses. We live together for protection -and company, but it can get lonely out here, seeing the same faces all the time. There's not a lot around. Maybe one of the others can give you a lift back? "

Seifer jerked awake. "You have cars?" Cars meant roads, and roads meant access, and access meant soldiers. But he hadn"t noticed any, and he hadn"t been arrested yet, which was always a good thing.

Gen laughed. "Hyne, no. There"s no roads out here. But a couple of the other villagers have ponies. Sledges. We know all the trails. It's our job. Where was it you said you were meeting your friends, anyway?"

"On one of the paths. Don't know the name. Just the way. It's just a bit further north." Seifer's voice sounded slightly slurred, even to him. He set down his mug. He couldn't afford to get too drunk. Who knew what he might come out with? That stuff had been strong, though. Too strong. He was starting to get tired. His eyelids ached. It was so warm.

Gennady looked at him quizzically. "You can rest, if you like. Have you come far? We"ll eat in a bit."

Seifer rested his head on his folded arms. "A fair way." He tried to fight the drowsiness. He knew he needed to ask more questions, needed to make sure it was safe. "Is there anyone else….in the village? Strangers ?"

Gennady"s voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away "Just you. What's the matter? We haven"t heard from your friends."

"S'all right. Nothin'.."

Seifer slept.

Gennady waited for a few minutes just to make sure he was asleep and then got up, trying to move the chair back as little as possible. He crept across the room, feet quiet on the bare planks, and pulled out his old pistol from its place above the fire.

He levelled the gun at Seifer, slumped onto the table, and gave his shoulder a cautious shake. Nothing happened. Just in case Gen searched through the deep recesses of his cupboards to find an old pair of his ex-SeeD handcuffs-well, you never knew what they'd come in useful for-and locked them round Seifer's wrists.

He'd discovered the trick by chance a few winters ago when he'd had a bad headache. The home-brewed spirit he brewed in the shed behind his cabin was fine on its own, but take painkillers as well and it knocked you out completely.

Gen considered his options. He bent, kicked the bag out from under the table to the corner of the room for later examination and pulled the legs out from under the chair in one smooth movement. Seifer collapsed to the floor bonelessly. Gen rifled through his clothes. To his surprise he found nothing until he pulled Seifer's coat from the chair. He flicked the knives out from under the coat collar and sleeves and held one up to the light, running his finger along it appraisingly.

"Not bad," he said, glancing swiftly at Seifer. The knight was oblivious, flat on his back on the floor and snoring softly. He searched further and pulled out a gun and a couple of clips of ammunition, carefully saved and wrapped in waxed paper, from a pocket of the coat. Gen flipped his own gun onto the table top and sighted along the barrel of the new one. It was a typical Saturday Night Special, cheap and nasty but not a bad weight. It hadn't been fired many times recently from what he could tell. The caliber of bullets was decent for hunting. A little heavy for travel, but all right.

Gennady placed the weapons on top of the pack for later appraisal and looked down at the man on the floor. He'd only seen Seifer Almasy a few times before the troubles, and hadn't paid him much attention. His job wasn"t to instruct new SeeDs, just to test new inventions and better methods of survival dreamed up by the Garden scientists. Thankfully he'd retired from his position a few weeks before the mission to Timber which had started all the stuff off.. A lucky coincidence, he'd thought at the time.

From what he could remember the guy didnt look that different, a bit thinner, perhaps, a lot dirtier, and without his trademark coat and gunblade. There was something …tired about him that there hadn't been before.

It took no genius to work out exactly what he might be doing in this lonely part of the backwoods.

Rumours of Galbadian troop movements in the foothills had been persisting for weeks, and Gen had the sneaking suspicion that he knew just what they'd been looking for.

He considered where to put Seifer. He decided against keeping him in the house. Thhere was too much of a risk that someone might hear something or come in uninvited to borrow a cup of sugar and then Gen'd have some serious explaining to do. The root cellar was the only place, really. Good fortune it had been leaking lately. Gen had had to store his food with Ella in the village this season. He'd planned to clean it out and refloor it, but events had overtaken him.

He unlaced Seifer's steel-capped boots and set them neatly against the wall. They'd seen better days, just like their owner, but they"d still hurt like a bitch if you caught one between your legs. They were also heavy. Gennady was a big man, but he knew it'd tax him to haul Seifer to the wood shelter.

Leaving Seifer on the floor (he wasn't about to be waking up any time soon with that dose and anyway, the guy looked like he could do with a rest) Gen walked through the yard to check the cellar. There was a heavy bar on the outside that could be locked to keep animals out and pissed-off mercenary cadets in. A small puddle of frozen water decorated the middle of the floor. He decided that it should be all right until he could get a message out to Garden.

He hauled a bucket full of water and set it into the corner of the cellar. When he returned to the cabin Seifer still hadn't moved.

Gennady grabbed his feet and dragged him across the floor and down the steps, wincing a little as Seifer's head smacked down the short flight of front stairs like hollow punctuation. He puffed and shifted his grip as he trudged across the yard; Seifer's cuffed arms trailing behind him in the mud. Kicking the door open, he dumped Seifer in a corner of the room and retreated, returning to the cabin where he lifted Seifer"s coat from the chair back and took it out too. The weather forecast predicted more snow, and a frozen Seifer would be no use to anyone, except as a rather large novelty ice-cube.

He closed the door, hauled up the bar up and slotted it into place, panting.

"Dammit, I'm getting old."

Gen retraced his steps to the cabin. He carefully rolled a cigarette and sat at the table smoking as the shadows lengthened around him in the dusty room.

Nothing for it.

Rummaging through the piles of junk, he surfaced finally with a small SeeD issue standard com device he"d liberated from the stores some time before he left. Batteries, batteries, batteries…huh. Ten minutes later, batteries had been found and tested and put in the wrong way and upside down and back to front and finally the whole thing was working.

He twiddled with some of the knobs, getting meaningless static for a while. _bzzzp…..rock fm timeless clas….bzzp….this is swordsfis….bzzp….Gardener"s Question time with…._

Some time later he tuned into the frequency he was searching for.

"Ex-Commander Cid, please. Yes, I"ll hold. No, it really is imperative that I speak with him. No, not Squall. Him. Now. Tell him it"s Gennady Ayers from …way back. He'll remember me."

There was a slight pause. He cleared his throat.

"Hello, Cid. Hey. It's Gen here. Your old survival advisor? Yeah, it's been a while. How's Edea? Yeah, I heard a bit about that. Anyway, I'm glad she's okay. In fact, I'm calling to talk about that. Sort of. Yeah. You could say I have a slight problem. I seem to have Seifer Almasy locked in my root cellar. I'd very much appreciate any kind of help. I think."

A longer pause. The phone buzzed. Someone, somewhere, was getting very excited about the news.

"Yes, I've heard rumours of Galbadian movement too. Yes, I appreciate that this is classified information. Sure. I'm sure it's him. I was there right up until just before all the trouble started. What? Yes. Blond hair, scar. Tall."

More noises from the phone. "Twenty four hours? Yes, I understand. I"m sure…I'll be ready. Take care. I"ll keep in touch."

Gennady replaced the com into a desk drawer. He reached across the scarred slab table, pulled the bottle of homebewed spirit towards him, poured a slug and knocked it back in one shot.

When he"d retired from Garden he"d never though something like this might happen. But they"d needed him and his experience back home, and it had been good to settle down and lead a normal life, just as much as any ex-SeeD ever could, after they'd gone out into the world and fought, touched magic for the first time and done things most people would never dream of.

Some time during the night he went out into the yard and checked the lock again. There was no sound from within the cellar. The door was securely locked.

Gen just had to wait.

In the cellar, Seifer dreamed.

The images slipped through his mind like cinefilm.

Focus, and freeze frame in on the look on Edea's face as she put her pale hand on his face and drew a thin line with her long, immaculately lacquered nail. There was blood; lacing its way down his cheek and dripping from his chin slowly onto the cool marble floor in little red rosettes of pain.

Focus. The feeling he'd got as he swept though the streets at the right hand of his sorceress, his goddess with the fair skin and yellow eyes and the dreams held in her hand. Like he could live forever. The wind swept across his hair and the words of magic flamed in his mind.

Focus. Time compression, long agonising frozen-in-amber moments of timeless falling, knowing there was nothing underneath the freezing darkness except a world of nothing but greys, and wishing there was just so there would be an end. Always further to fall, always more blood to shed, always more tears someone else cried and he didn't.

Seifer wrenched himself to wakefulness. It felt like slowly breaking the surface of a black oily sea that sucked him down and didn't want to let him go, afraid for one gut-wrenching moment that this time he wouldn"t get out, that maybe this time it was real.

_Too much fucking hope_, he thought furiously. Always thinking things were going to get better, maybe that all the shit in his head would be sorted out. Fucking conscience. The dreams always came back, he should know by now. No matter how far he ran.

He opened his eyes, expecting to see the night sky and maybe a moon between a black spiderweb of branches. But there was just darkness and damp earth smells and although it was not so far from many of the places he'd slept in the last two months it was way too goddamn dark.

Seifer closed his eyes, but the room was just as black. He touched his face to make sure he hadn't gone blind and swore as his other hand came up to his cheekbone like some kind of malevolent puppet. He jumped, cursed and felt cautiously along to feel a smooth unyielding metal band around both wrists. _Cuffs. Damn_. And unless this was all some really strange dream he was really in trouble. Again. Should have jumped out of that window in Marduk when he had the chance.

He should have known better. It was never a good idea to trust strangers you met in the woods. Hell, it had never worked even in all those fairy stories he'd read when he was a kid. Not even in all those stupid fucking books he'd checked out from the library and never returned, back when he still cared enough to think that you could make a difference with your life, that dreams came true. Sucker.

A quick search revealed nothing, no gun, no knives. Even the tiny thin daggers he kept slipped down the special pocket in the side of his trousers were gone.

That old bastard had taken his boots, too.

He got up from the floor (hard-packed and frozen icy earth, by the feel of it, so no luck there) and crept for three cautious steps across the room until his outstretched fingers grazed another wall of damp pine-smelling logs. His foot kicked something in the thick heavy darkness and he bent down and picked it up, juggling the mystery item from hand to hand. Great. A fucking carrot. He could just see threatening the guy with that when he came in. Maybe he could stick it in his back and the old guy'd believe it was a gun.

Yeah. And maybe if he got really lucky, he could tunnel out of here with his bare hands by the morning.

Seifer carefully paced the room out, five paces by five. It had a low musty ceiling that brushed his filthy hair as he walked.

He kicked a hard object halfway across the second circuit of the room and swore as it splashed freezing liquid across his socks. He knelt down and tasted it cautiously. It was water, and very cold. The man had left him something to drink. Maybe he could hold his breath and stick his face in it until he drowned or smash it to pieces and tunnel out using the planks. Yeah. He"d have more success with trying to convince the old guy a carrot was a gun.

He continued his exploration of the cell. There was nothing else except a door that was firmly locked from the outside. The metal of the lock cold enough that Seifer could feel it even though thick hide gloves. Some big heavy object pushed across it, too. It didn"t give when he charged it with his shoulder or kicked it with shoeless feet or stood running his fingers across it desperately, trying to figure at least some way out of here.

He knew where he was. He was locked in that damned sunken cellar thing.

The last time he'd been locked in like this, it had been in the disciplinary room back in Balamb .Back where all this shit started. At least this place didn"t have a couple of bored SeeD cadets on the door, or orders to "Assess your behaviour and how it contravened all major SeeD rules in a written report of no less that two thousand words, quoting Seed manual pages forty-six to one hundred–and-seventeen with listed references to appropriate texts." Fuck that. If he started listing every SeeD rule he'd broken since last summer, he'd be here months. And hopefully he wouldn't have to stay that long.

_No_, a little voice whispered inside his head_. It shouldn't be too long at all_.

The metal was so cold it burned on his skin. He pulled the cuffs of his sweater down and worked them down under the handcuffs but as soon as he moved they just rode up again.

Stupid.

Seifer wrapped his thick sheepskin jacket around himself, shivering so hard his teeth ached and his stomach muscles burned. At least the headache was going away. He lay in the silent, freezing darkness, the smell of earth and and rotten root vegetables all around him, with blood beating in his ears and his breath fast and cloudy in the still air.

Seifer didn't sleep the rest of the night.

Eventually, he ate the carrot.


	4. Chapter Four:Buying Time

Chapter Four

_I stayed awake for hours again last night_

_Just searching for a reason to keep up the fight_

_I've made choices I don't regret,_

_But I"ve got problems I don't get._

_Oh let's wait one more day for the conversation_

_One more day to make it right_

_Let's get away from the confrontation_

_One more day, just buying time._

_Buying Time, Great Big Sea_

Dammit, Quistis thought, she'd _fought_ for this mission. Trying to persuade Squall, persuade them all, persuade maybe even herself that Seifer was worth more to them dead than alive, that they really couldn't let the Galbadians get away with this. Even if Seifer had never been a fully fledged SeeD, even if they hadn't heard of him for twelve months, even if he _had_ tried to destroy the world.

When the intelligence reports came in that implied, in a few carefully-chosen words, that Galbadia were sending troops into Marduk to capture one ex SeeD cadet and general nuisance, she'd been one of the few that had said maybe they, the Garden, should send people in.

She hadn't intended being sent on the mission herself. Thinking that it would be a great idea to find out what the Galbadians wanted with Seifer was one thing, but being sent out here, alone, with orders to go get him and drag him, kicking and screaming if need be, back through the Galbadian lines to a safe transport ship was quite another.

"There isn't another SeeD we"d rather send," Squall had told her. "You"re the only person for the job." _But I"m not even twenty!_ she'd wanted to shout. _You must have better agents than me, better trackers, people with more experience and more muscle and more brains even. And Seifer-_

_Seifer's an asshole._

She sighed. Sometimes being one of the heroines of Balamb was a double-edged sword.

She trudged on, boots sunk ankle deep in snow. The cold bit through her carefully chosen winter gear. And it wasn"t even full winter yet, it was mid-November, and there was only a faint dusting of snow on the ground compared to the usual six-feet high drifts.

She hoped that the man who"d contacted them just had some unfortunate hiker locked up in his cellar. She'd get there and it wouldn"t be the right man and she could just apologise and call Garden or wait it out and have them come get her. It wouldn't be very intrepid and certainly it certainly wouldn't be one of the textbook missions she'd read to her students, but it would be completely and utterly mundane. And right now Quistis could totally do mundane.

She thought it ironic, seeing as she"d been going so stir-crazy back in Garden, with her teaching and papers to mark and safe, familiar faces. It had been mudane. It had also been boring and predictable. And it had been driving her mad.

But no one hiked in the Galbadian forests, only the insane and the merely badly lost. There were a few settlements spread about, wherever the locals had enough weapons and techniques and training to hold their own against the monsters and make a lucrative living trading off furs and tentacles and certain recreational drugs readily available in some of the lonelier mountainous holdings. But even they were few and far between. And they had a tendency to disappear, change, and move without notice. There weren"t even any decent maps of this area, for Hyne's sake.

She knew that this would have been a major factor in Seifer deciding to run into it.

_The bastard_, she thought. Why couldn"t he at least have run somewhere warm. And maybe not entirely crawling with monsters. And, if this was going to be her fantasy, why not somewhere with hot and cold running water and soft beds? Or a minibar. Quistis hadn't been on vacation in years. Literally.

Worse, Cid had personally recommended this man to her. He had told Quistis that Gennady Ayers used to be a survival instructor, back in the old days of Garden, before Seifer and Squall and the sorceresses and the messengers. So, worse luck for her, he probably knew what he was talking about.

Which meant that when she got to this man's house, she was going to have to deal with a very angry Seifer Almasy, who she was then going to have to extract through hostile territory.

A branch deposited a load of snow down the back of Quistis's neck. She swore.

Her destination wasn't far ahead. She'd already been walking for a day, having been dropped off some miles away out of Galbadian radar with a double load of equipment and provisions, a brief, not entirely accurate map, and the promise that there would be someone waiting in a few days time to pick both of them up, if she managed to get that far.

Quistis checked her map. _Not far now_, she thought.

Thirty minutes of hard walking later, the sun was high in the sky. It was pretty, really. The light glittered from the thin snow and black rocks that jutted out from the hills on either side. Quistis's tactician's mind couldn"t let go of the layout beneath. She assessed the lie of the ground, the wind direction; planning out every move suitable for every situation.

_If a person came round that corner, armed with a sword, magic, a gunblade, a whip-I would-If it wasn't a a person at all, but a snow lion or a Marlboro then I would…_

She caught sight of a small village down in the valley and checked her map again. There it was, the knowledge clear in a computer printout with elevations and contour ridges marked approximately, dotted lines for trails and an X marking the spot.

The information lay like a lead brick in her stomach. Village of Yesnaby. Population: 85. Contact: Gennady Ayers (ex-SeeD). Your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Quistis reached for her com and toggled it open. The reception was unclear, cloudy, but she caught a hint of a voice that might have been Xu's. "Omega. Repeat, Omega. Are you receiving me? Over."

What might have been a "yes," floated from the tiny speaker.

"Um, Right. This is Delta One, Repeat. Delta One. I have reached the dragon's lair. Repeat. I have reached the dragon's lair. Over. Do you copy?"

A hiss of static, then.. "Copy..bttzz…elta one. Over and out."

Stupid codes. They should have never let Zell loose on them. She felt like she was in a cheap paperback novel with an embossed gold letter on the front and a bad title like "The Phi Tau Delta Conspiracy".

She flipped the com closed and replaced it safely in her parka pocket, pulling up her fur lined hood more closely to cover her face and shroud the thick scarf over her nose and mouth. She consulted the tiny village map on the flipside of her printout and she frowned. They'd said Gen's house was slightly away from the others. And Quistis was _here_. Which meant that he was…..about _here_. She located a faint trail of smoke through the trees and started to head towards it. Bingo.

That was the end of the easy part of her mission.

The cabin was slightly away from the other houses. It was small and unprepossessing. It huddled into the trees surrounding it in a state of gentle decay not helped by the piles of wood that covered all its walls. Quistis looked at it doubtfully.

_Well, this must be it_, she thought, and walked out from the trees, onto the stone path, knocking snow off her boots. The front door was carved from a single slab of heavy wood. She reached out for the knocker and the door swung open at once, making Quistis jump, her fingers going for Save the Queen laced through her belt.

"SeeD Trepe? I"m Gennady Ayers." A hand grabbed hers and wrung it with the force of a mousetrap.

"Um, Quistis Trepe," Quistis said as she surreptitiously tried to shake some feeling back into her fingers.

A few minutes later after bags had been taken and fires lit and boots kicked off. Gennady pulled back a chair and got down to business. "Right. Let"s cut to the chase."

Quistis settled cautiously into a fat armchair. She looked puzzled for a moment and pulled two badly creased hardback books and a pipe from under the seat before she sat down again. Gen took them absently.

"Cid said you…..found him a day ago."

"Well. To be honest I would have been suspicious even if I hadn't recognised him. We don"t see many visitors round here, and some of the ones we get aren't the kind you"d want to invite into your home. Anyway, Cid said he"d be sending someone." He paused."Though I didn't expect you to be quite so….young."

Quistis's voice turned to ice. "I can assure you, sir, I am more than capable."

"Oh, yes, I know. I know.. One of the heroes-sorry, heroines of the Sorceresses Wars. You must have done well." Gen smiled. "You're one of the kids that Edea raised. In that orphanage of hers. I remember him telling us about you. About all of you."

"I fail to see what this has to do with the mission, sir. But yes, I am."

He leant back. "Stop being so touchy. I don't think for one second that you aren't capable of dealing with this. Otherwise Cid or Squall or whoever's running the Garden these days would never have sent you. I respect his judgement and if he says you can do it, you can do it. It just seems odd that this guy's been missing for almost a year now and no one's done anything. Why all the interest all of a sudden?"

She relaxed slightly. "Well, sir, as I'm sure you are aware, a month ago we had no idea that Seifer Almasy was even still alive. I, for one, just assumed he died during Time Compression. That he never came out. And we were perhaps glad to …let that lie. If anyone asked, we could just say he was dead. I don't think Cid, even now, is keen to take this to trial unless international pressures force him to, but if the Galbadians get to him first we won't have much of a chance. While we're taking it through the courts, there"s too many opportunities for someone to fall downstairs or to have a fight with guards and end up "accidentally" shot through the , you must know that the fortunes of the Galbadia Garden have gone downhill since the wars. Headmaster Martine feels, not without reason, that his Garden was brought into disfavour by the recent….events. Business has been down. A lot of clients have been coming to us instead. Balamb's by no means taken all the work, but we"ve made a very good living out of it. Martine was one of the chief opposers to Edea's reinstatement, but with public favour towards Balamb, how could he protest? It was clear to everyone that she'd been controlled in some way. But Martine got very unpleasant about it all. I think he feels that if a public figure were made to take the blame for the damage, then most of the repercussions could be moved off their Garden onto a more, shall we say, easily recognisable figure. It's not entirely a personal vendetta,of course, but Martine was against the whole sorceress thing from the start. Edea's safe now, she"s too much of a public figure and she was respected for years before all of this happened. And that's where Seifer comes in."

Gen agreed. "A scapegoat."

"That's right. According to our sources, the intelligence forces at Galbadia Garden have been searching for news of Seifer"s reappearance ever since the end of the wars. Then finally they started to recieve definite reports about two months ago from Marduk, in the north of Trabia. And I mean definite. Since the end of the wars we"ve had more 'Seifer Almasy sightings' than I've had…cups of coffee. Balamb pumas. Loch Ness monsters. Yetis. Seifers. We mostly file them in the wastebasket. According to the sources, a reliable witness had seen Seifer Almasy, and apparently he's been there for a considerable length of time. And some of the activities he's thought to have engaged in were illegal to say the least. So the authorities of Marduk were more than happy to let Galbadia in to search for a wanted criminal, with a substantial financial that's when we started to hear what was going on. We sent troops as well but somehow he managed to escape from the city through the maintenance tunnels. We"ve also had informers stationed at all the major mountain passes for weeks."

"A good idea," Gen said. "I gather Galbadia have lost a considerable number of troops and resources trying to follow him through the forest. And frankly, I'm not surprised. It's a bad part of the country. One man might get through relatively easily, if he knew how to fight and had a Marlboro's own luck, but sending a large number of troops through is just asking for trouble. Monsters from miles around, and supply problems too." He paused, "Go on. Want a drink? I've got coffee, tea? You must be cold."

Quistis smiled gratefully, glad for the familiar rituals of coffee and sugar and a hot drink. "Yes. Coffee, please."

"So what'll happen once he returns to Garden?"

"Oh, I'm not saying that Seifer will be let off scot-free, even at Balamb," Quistis said hastily. "There's been no precedent for this case before, so a lot depends on whether he was really being controlled in the same way as Edea or not, which is a matter of …some debate, considering his previous conduct at Balamb Garden. Authority problems. Conflict. Arrogance. Fights with other students. Disruptive behavior. And, added to that, he's been accused of a number of unexplained crimes in Marduk. Of course, since the government there is as corrupt as hell, it"s possible that some at least of those crimes were not Seifer"s doing. In fact, it would have been physically impossible for him to have committed some of them without being two places at once. Nevertheless, those must be taken into account too. And at the end of the day, he's our problem. He was one of ours once. Not Galbadia"s. Balamb's. Technically, he's still under Balamb jurisdiction and must be tried in a military court. Nobody just gets..'disappeared, or held up as a scapegoat just because some fool didn"t ask the right questions at the right time. If nothing else, it would look like we can't handle our own matters. And that's not good for business."

"You're very objective, aren't you?"

"I try to be."

Gen put a steaming cup of coffee in front of her. "To be frank, I think it's nothing less than a miracle and good weather that Almasy has survived as long as he has. It can get tough out here. I just hope you've got enough equipment for the two of you." He lifted a pack from the floor and dumped Seifer"s possessions on the table. "A gun. Three rounds of ammunition, two knives, a whetstone, half a dead squirrel, fifty gil, two groundsheets, a damp sleeping bag, one empty hipflask smelling of spirits, a lighter and half a packet of Lucky Strikes. I"m ashamed on behalf of all SeeD ex-survival teachers"

Quistis shook her head "I thought he quit."

"You used to know him personally? I thought…"

She shrugged. "It was a couple of years ago. I used to be Seifer's teacher. Not that I made a very good job of it"

Gen smiled "I'm sure you did a very good job."

"Yeah. Except for the whole "joining with the sorceress and trying to destroy the world as we know it" thing"

He shrugged.

"Anyway, that's partly why I was sent on this mission. And, speaking of which, I better get on my way. I"m sure that the sooner you have the use of your cellar back, the better it"ll be. Toss the stuff outside. We"ll have to go through it later."

"Are you sure you'll be all right? It's quite a long way to travel. If I can do anything..?"

She gave him a look so old-fashioned it was practically Neolithic. "I told you, I can manage. You managed perfectly fine with your ingenuity and I'm sure I can do no less with the whole of SeeD"s resources at my disposal. How did you manage it anyway? Cid was most surprised. They"ve been after him for months and then we get a call from the middle of nowhere asking if we can please come take our Seifer back."

Gen shrugged. "I just got lucky. He should just have been out for five minutes but then he started to snore so I just left him. Let's go wake him up."

"Wait." Quistis pulled out her com device. "Omega. Are you receiving me? This is Delta One. Over." The reception was better in the village. She could hear Xu"s voice quite clearly.

"This is Omega. Copy."

"This is Delta One. Um, the dragon is ready to fly. Do you copy?"

Xu had the grace to sound slightly embarrassed. "I copy, Delta One. On the record, good luck, we're sure you'll do us proud. Off the record, don"t let that bastard get away with anything. Good luck, Quistis. You"ll need it. Over and out."

Gennady raised one eyebrow, and Quistis blushed. "New codes," she said as she waited for Gen to pull his boots on and struggle into a heavy torn coat and gloves. She wondered if she still hated Seifer, for making her lose her instructo'"s licence, for being so vicious and hating no matter how many times she"d tried to get close to him.

She was surprised to find she didn't, not really. Those old battles had been fought and lost or won long ago. Just a year, but it seemed like lifetimes since she'd had to watch him fail and rise and fail and fall once more. So long ago. And besides, if she wanted a personal vendetta with Seifer Almasy she was going to have to queue.

Gen opened the door.

Seifer was half-asleep at the time, lost in half-formed dreams, heavy exhaustion and misery. He didn't even realise what was happening before the door creaked open. He jumped up still only half awake and the light hit his face like a miniature supernova. After the darkness of the tightly chinked cellar, the afternoon sunlight hit the snow and reflected from all sides with all the intensity of a blast furnace, but unfortunately none of the heat. He went blind. Somebody dragged him out and yanked his arms away from his eyes. Seifer cursed as the wind cut through his clothes like knives. As he looked up through weeping eyes he saw a familiar silhouette.

Quistis.

She was all dressed up for the cold in fluffy coat and military issue winter boots. She looked just as he remembered. Pale and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

_What the hell is she doing here?_

Quistis smiled at him. "I"m sure you"re wondering why Squall chose me to go on this mission," she said.

"Bite me."

It's because I"m the only SeeD he thought might not be tempted to push you off a cliff in the middle of nowhere and claim a monster got you. And yes, that does include him."

"That makes me feel so special."

She took something from her pocket "Gennady, hold him still."

There was a click as a pistol made contact with the back of Seifer"s skull, forcing his head forwards and exposing the nape of his neck.

He tensed in futile desperation. It wasn't over yet, or all the running and fighting had been for nothing. It couldn"t be over.

But Quistis hadn't come all this way to execute him. And he wouldn't be able to try anything before Gen pulled the trigger and made a nice round hole in the back of his head. At the moment he wasn"t sure whether they"d find anything in it. "Can"t a man take a camping trip?"

"Well, yes. But when the most wanted man in three countries tries to flee into the woods he gets the whole world up his ass."

He stalled for time "So what"s my head worth now? In Marduk, they were offering sixty thousand gil. "

"It"s gone up to eighty thousand, last I heard. Must be the whole "running into the woods and not letting them catch you" thing" Do you know how pissed off they must be by now? I really wouldn't like to be in your shoes when they get you"

"Isn't your job supposed to be to stop them? And I know I'm supposed to say 'Is that it' but you know, that's quite a lot of money."

She smiled wider. "It is."

"I mean, I wouldn"t pay eighty thousand gil for me, and I AM me."

"I wouldn"t pay eight gil for you," Quitis said. "and I"ve known you since you were five."

"That's because you've known me since we were five", Seifer said."Look, if you're going to shoot me, can you please get on with it. I'm getting cold."

"You think I'm going to shoot you?" Quistis's eyes widened in shock for a fraction of a second. Seifer mentally licked his finger and scored a point on thin air."Certainly not. Now hold still."

There was a faint click from behind Seifer. Something flickered red in the corner of his eye. Safety catch? He didn"t think so. "Trepe...what the fuck?"

There was a sudden touch of cold at the base of his skull, just below the hairline, and then a sharp pain like an insect bite. He flinched away. !What's that?"

She ignored him. "Seifer, you must be wondering why I'm here."

"You think?" Seifer snapped as Gen released him. He spun around, trying to see out of the corner of his eyes just what the fuck she"d just put on his head. He slid cuffed hands up to the back of his neck, and his fingertips contacted a smooth metal surface half covered by unwashed hair. "Trepe, just what the fuck is this?"

She blinked at the obscenity. "It"s just a homing tag. Anyway, don"t you want to know why I"m here?"

"Maybe because you"re the last person I wanted to see. Maybe you"re a hallucination and I"m really freezing to death. Maybe I"ve just got a really twisted subconscious and Hyne hates me. Oh, wait, I knew that already. "

Quistis sighed. "Seifer, get up. We have to go. The pickup point's some way away and they won't wait long. "

"What pickup point?"

"To take you back to Garden."

He felt his heart sink. "Of course. The part where I have to face up to the consequences of my actions. How far?"

"Three days due south."

"That"s through the Galbadian lines."

"Exactly" Quistis smiled. "They won"t be expecting us. Plus it's about the only way we can be sure that they"re not monitoring the air traffic properly and avoid an international situation. This way we can just deal with this internally. No one will have to know, and your sentence is likely to be much less severe. The Galbadians think they've got you on the run. The only thing that's stopped them landing more troops right here to cut you off is the forest and the monsters. It's hard to supply their men. But they've stationed troops at all the northern passes. You never would have made it."

He grinned, a bright blade of malice through the untidy straggle of dirty blond stubble and caked blood."What if I run? Or if I just stay here?"

Quistis sighed and glanced up at the sky. It threatened snow. "Seifer, I"m warning you. What in Hyne"s name did you think I put that homing device on you for?"

"Well, this is just a shot in the dark, but I"m guessing it was to keep an eye on me."He stared flatly at her. "What else?"

"Really," Quistis said flatly. "Did you think we didn't expect this? You've not been known for your co-operation in the past. It's forty miles to our rendezvous. I"m not dragging you all the way. Even if you have lost weight since I last saw you." She glared at him.

He snarled. "Yeah, well, while some of us have been sitting in nice comfy chairs in the Garden painting your nails, some of us have been on the camping trip from hell."

"Whose fault was that? None of us asked you to be the Sorceress' Knight. No one asked you to run into the woods. No, Almasy, you managed to screw that up all by yourself."

"Whereas you"ve made such a fucking success of your life. I bet you're still an a waste of fame."

Quistis glared at him. Behind her, Gennady gave them both an odd look. "Get up"

"No." Seifer told her."We'llnever make it past the Galbadian lines anyway. They"ve got this area sewn up tighter than Leonhart"s ass."

"You let me worry about that," she said. "Now let's get going."

"No."

"Do you really think I'm just going to let you sit there until the Galbadians find us?"

"Like I've got anything better to do. Oh, wait. Freeze to death."

Quistis slipped her hand inside her left glove. "Don't tell me I didn't warn you." She flicked her wrist.

Red-hot pain exploded in Seifer's skull. He doubled over in the snow, clutching his head. After ten seconds or so the pain abated. After he could think again he muttered, "Just what the hell IS that thing?"

Quistis raised her chin slightly. She looked faintly horrified, but resolute. "I told you, didn't I? Did you expect Garden to just send me out here. The transmitter in your skull sends radio waves directly to Garden, wherever it might be. You"ve been tracked to the nearest metre since that thing first went in your skull."

Seifer scowled. "Congratulations, Quistis. You"ve just managed to turn me into Trabia's first walking radio station. Now everyone knows we're out here. What a clever move. Now I can see why they made you an instructor."

She scowled." It"s a cloaked tracking frequency"

"So what was that?"

"We developed it to control the monsters in the Training centre. It didn't work terribly well, but we found it had other uses." She sighed. "Whether you like it or not, Seifer, you"re just a pawn. Again. Think of it this way. Come with me, and you live, for one. Your co-operation will be noted in any legal action that might be brought against you in Balamb. You're still under the legal protection of the Balamb Garden authorities, no matter what you"ve done. If you're going down, at least it's going to be legally."

"Whatever. I've been shot at and chased through the woods for miles and now you sic the lawyers on me? Some things are just too cruel."

"Shut up and listen," she said. "The Galbadians are pissed. Business is down and they happen to need a whipping boy who isn't the wife of the founder of the most powerful mercenary force around. If you refuse, even if we let you go, you wouldn't last five days. Think of it this way. If you die of the cold in the woods or the Galbadians get you, then nobody will know what happened. They'll just assume you're dead already, that you never came out of Time Compression. So you leave with me, or you die, or you spend some time in Galbadia getting everything you ever thought you knew about sorceresses dragged out of you feet-first. Your choice."

He scowled." You make it sound so tempting. Why don"t they just send someone to pick us up here? I"m sure the intrepid Gennady and his friends here could spare their root cellar for a few more days. Hyne, I"d even share it. "

Quistis wrinkled her nose." Don"t you listen? They"re monitoring this area. Breaking through their lines is the one thing they won't expect you to do. And there is no way I am sharing a blanket with you, much less a room. Really, Seifer, have you smelled yourself lately?"

"So give me a couple of hours to have a wash and a shave. The offer still 'll be regretting this missed opportunity all your life." She was right, though, and he knew it. He smelt to high heaven. In the forest he hadn't noticed it so much, but kneeling beside immaculate Quistis in her pristine furs and SeeD issue winter boots, he realised what a spectacle he must look in his ragged jacket and socks, stained with sweat, and blood.

She ignored him and turned back to Gennady "Is everything ready?"

He nodded. "Packs, four days' rations, maps, everything. You should be fine. Just be careful getting through their lines and remember what I told you. I"ve marked a few trails on the maps. If you're lucky, they'll never even know you were there."

She smiled confidently "I'm sure we can manage."

_We_, Seifer thought sarcastically. _You mean you_.Quistis was on her own. But he had a problem. Running again was pretty much out, he'd only been ahead of the Galbadians by three or four days the first time and he must have spent at least a couple of days locked in the cellar waiting for Quistis. He'd never stand a chance on his own without the maps or weapons…

Weapons, he thought, and looked at Quistis. She was armed. Save the Queen was strapped to her hip. A whip wasn't much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

She nodded to Gen "Okay, untie him. We should be going."

Seifer held his hands out. Gennady unlocked the cuffs and stepped back. Seifer stood up slowly, knees aching and cold. He flexed his wrists, trying to massage some feeling back into them.

Quistis turned away and Seifer lunged. His fingers touched the smooth hilt of her whip before the pain sent him staggering to his knees and he wound up somewhere flat on his face in the snow near the tarp with Gen pinning him down. Copper tasting blood seeped into his mouth from his nose. It froze on the snow as he watched.

Quistis glanced contemptuously at Seifer as a stream of cursewords drifted up from the floor. "Hyne, Seifer, you still really don't learn, do you? No wonder you never made SeeD. "

"Doesn't it piss you off, being right all the time?"

She sighed "If you keep this up, this is going to be a really long trip."

Seifer shrugged. He grabbed his boots from the tarp and started lacing them up. When he had finished he fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the remains of his pack and lit up, letting the smoke trickle out of his mouth and breathing it in again through his nose.

"Aren"t you going to help pack?"

Seifer exhaled and blew a cloud of smoke in her face."This wasn"t my idea"

She coughed. "Maybe not, but it's your stuff, and if there"s anything you want, you"d best get it now or go without. I'm not sharing my blanket with you when you find out you"ve left all your bedding."

"Damn. And I just got my hopes up as well. Me, you, a single blanket and the romantic glow of a few burning bridges. What could be nicer?"

Quistis's hand moved towards her left glove again. Seifer followed her movement with his eyes. He weighed his options, crouched down in the snow and started unbuckling his pack. Besides, he wouldn't have put it past that bitch to put a couple of bricks in with his stuff.

He started rifling through the contents and a pair of socks hit him in the back of the head.

"What the hell was that for?"

"To make impressions of very small reindeer. To put on your hands so we can leave some really strange tracks and confuse the hell out of the Galbadians. To wear, dumbass. Yours are wet."

"Trepe. I never knew you cared"

"I care about you not getting frostbite. We"ve got forty miles to travel through enemy territory in three days. It"d be nice if you were able to walk."

"Take this thing out of my skull and I"ll be running in the opposite direction whether I have wet feet or not."

Gen watched as they packed up and left the clearing. A trail of cigarette smoke drifted behind Seifer"s retreating back like an angry reluctant ghost.

"Good luck," he called after them but Quistis was too far in front to hear and if Seifer, trailing behind, heard it, he ignored him.

Whn they had vanished into the trees he shrugged and set off for Vasily's house. He decided he needed at least some of the luxuries of civilisation, conversation, lethally strong home-brewed spirit, a fire, and if not someone to talk to about his troubles then a place to sit and think about them for a while.


	5. Chapter Five: Sitting in Muddy Water

Chapter Five

_Sitting in muddy water,_

_Isn"t such a bad life,_

_If it ends after the first time…._

_Yoko Kanno: The Real Folk Blues_

"We"re lost in the freezing snowy woods," Seifer said, "and the only dry clothing we have between us is one blanket. Look, I don't suppose we could…."

"No chance."

"I was going to say, "We could huddle together for body warmth." But if you like, we can get out of our wet clothes and you could let me…..."

"Not another word," interrupted Quistis. "I'd rather freeze." She turned her back on Seifer. There was the sound of ripping fabric. "Have half."

Seifer caught the blanket in his face. He glared at Quistis suspiciously. "Trepe, did you give me the small half?"

"Shut up and go to sleep! We"ve got our sleeping bags. You won"t freeze. Unfortunately," she added.

He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like "fucking ice bitch" over his shoulder but she rolled over and ignored him. It was freezing cold despite her gear. Hyne, how had Seifer survived so long out here? She'd never taken him as the kind of person who loved to spend time in the woods: cut Seifer down the middle and he"d have 'city boy' written all through him like a stick of beach rock. There weren't enough people to notice him in the country. She decided to ask. "Seifer? Are you awake?"

She knew he wasn't. She could see him in the darkness; lying on his back and staring up at the roof of the tent.

"I am now."

"How did you find enough to eat out here?"

"Why"re you asking?" he shot back. "Don"t tell me you didn't pack any food."

She sighed. "Of course I did. A good SeeD always plans ahead."

"A good SeeD? Trepe, how would you know?"

"How would you know, Seifer? You didn't even make SeeD."

"What is there to eat? Trees. Monsters. Rabbits. Us. Are you going to go to sleep and leave me alone or what?"

But he was still lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, when she finally drifted off into a restless and uneasy sleep some hours later. It was very dark; a freezing and heavy blackness that resonated with the sound of cracking trees and wind in the branches and the rustlings and squeals of small nocturnal creatures. Maybe he just slept with his eyes open. Maybe she didn't care.

Some hours later Quistis woke to the sound of drifting snow and dull grey dawn light seeping through the tent. There was the faintest glow above the horizon to the east.

Seifer was finally asleep on the other side of the tent. He was curled away from her and she could just see the blinking red eye of the transmitter in the base of his skull.

He looked different when he was sleeping, younger, more vulnerable and without his perpetual wary glare. She'd seen him watching her, not in a particularly threatening way, or even a lecherous one, but like he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She didn't quite know what he would do then. Maybe he'd just run in the opposite direction and then get a really bad migraine.

Quistis thought how young he really was, how young they all were. She could almost forget that he'd tried to give Rinoa to the sorceress, kill all of them and help take over the world. Maybe he'd been under a spell, some kind of magic or mind control or threats, or maybe it was just as simple as her offering him all he'd ever wanted, and him not having a good enough reason or enough sense to turn her down. He'd acted like a jerk the last few times she'd met him during the Sorceresses War, but then, from what she could remember he'd also acted like a jerk the whole time she'd tried to teach him, too.

Quistis sat up in her blankets and sleeping bag, shivering as the cold air rushed into her little cocoon of warmth. She was itching all over. Bugs had been in the tent during the night. She was itching all over. Maybe she'd caught them off Seifer. She directed a venomous glance at Seifer. He shifted in his sleep and muttered something unintelligible. His feet were sticking out of the bottom of his ripped sleeping bag and without thinking she flipped her half of the blanket onto his legs to cover him.

What the hell do you think you're doing? I was fucking trying to sleep!"

"I was just…checking to make sure you were all right." Her excuse sounded lame, even to her ears.

"Worried about your precious prisoner, Instructor?

Quistis sighed. Just five seconds awake and already he was getting on her nerves. "No thanks to you. Gennady told me just what you were spending your time doing in Marduk. Hyne knows, Seifer, you"re not making this any easier for me. Do you know just how many people are out looking for you right now? I should think if they ever catch up with us it'll be a competition to see who gets to tear you apart first!"

His voice was still slightly rough with sleep. " What the hell did you expect me to do, Trepe? It's not like I know how to do anything else.

Her voice was a whisper. "You could have been a bodyguard…..damn, didn't they need burger flippers? Soldiers? Why didn't you just do everyone a favour and just die? Why did you have to kill more people?"

Seifer snorted. "Listen to yourself, Trepe. You're a fucking mercenary. Mercenaries. Kill. People."

"Not for fun!"

"I didn't kill people for fun! It was a job. What do you care anyway? You never met them."

"You're a callous bastard," she spat. "It would have been easier if you'd died in Time Compression."

He slumped back."You"re probably going to get your wish because you"re never going to get us through here. We"re so screwed. It's a pity you won't be alive to enjoy it and do your dance of effortless fucking superiority on my gravel. Who do you think you are, my fucking conscience?" He coughed and spat, narrowly missing her shoes.

She gave him a disgusted glance. "We better pack up."

Seifer squinted at the sky. "We should be a day ahead of their scouts. Why don't we lie up today and then try to slip past them tonight?"

"We have to keep moving. If we don"t we"ll miss the transport. And I certainly don"t intend to spend any more time than I have to getting there."

"Can"t wait to see my head on a spike?"

"I don"t care where it is as long as it's away from me," she spat. She turned away from him and went out into the woods to wash up. The sun was just rising and her shadow was long against the ground. The light was blindingly bright but provided no heat. She wondered why any sane person would choose to live in this wilderness?

The snow melted as she scrubbed it over her face. Meltwater soaked her cuffs. If the snow had any dramatic licence, it would have boiled while Quistis mentally composed a list of all the things that were Seifer's fault.

Her righteous wrath was slightly disarmed when she reached the edge of the clearing and found that he"d already packed up the tent.

Seifer threw something at her and she ducked, reflexively.

"Little jumpy today, Trepe?"

"I can't imagine why." She turned, hunting in the grass for the ration bar, and picked it up, pulling her gloves off with her teeth.

Seifer looked puzzled. "Whatever."

She sighed."I don"t trust you." Damn, these ration bars always tasted the same. Great, as long as you liked five different flavours of exquisitely nutritious, vitamin and mineral balanced cardboard. Plastic crackled under her gloved fingers and she carefully stowed the wrapper in her pocket. There was no use advertising to everyone they were here by dropping litter.

"Why not?" Seifer said. "I'm hurt."

"Three guesses."

"Um, trying to destroy the world, trying to destroy the world and trying to destroy the world. Looks like you should have stayed at home. With all the people you can trust."

"So they should have sent somebody else. Tell Squall that when you get back to Garden. And talking of getting back, if you're quite packed up, we should be going."

Seifer took one look at Quistis' face and shut his mouth. Fine. Like he cared about her problems. And if he pissed her off he was just going to get a headache again and the light off the snow was hurting his eyes enough as it was.

_I should have run last night_, Seifer thought as he picked up his bag and adjusted the straps. But he hadn't, because there was nowhere else to go."Do you know where we are?" he asked.

She pulled the map out from a side pocket and unfolded it carefully. "Here"

Seifer squinted at the map. "I don't think so. We came from this place, not there. If you look carefully, the contours look the same. I think we just came up this bit. Right between the little green squiggles there and the little red line here. We only walked for three hours last night. We're not as far ahead as you think. Walking here's different. You have to go round trees and things. You're just thinking we're walking as the crow flies."

"Says the person that spent geography lessons drawing pictures of chicks with huge…"

"I've changed!."

She sniffed. "You could have fooled me."

"Any time. But we're still lost"

"We have a map. We"re not lost. We might not know right where we are right now. But we're not lost. Yet"

"Typical. No one with a map admits they"re lost," he said.

It might have made Seifer feel a little happier to know that, in fact, they were both wrong.

_Some time later…._

The light shone off the snow. Quistis was painfully aware of just how good a target they made outlined sharply against the thin white carpet. But there was no sound, just the quiet sounds of feet crunching of snow and the occasional curse from Seifer up front as he slipped on a rock or stepped through the frozen ice hiding a puddle. They were safe, for the moment.

Seifer had been surly all morning, snarling at the slightest question and going through his last packet of cigarettes like a pimp in a nunnery. After a couple of hours of that, Quistis snapped and yelled at him to shut up, or speed up, or for Hyne's sake stop blowing smoke in her face. Seifer just smirked and sniped back at her, Quistis got angrier and threatened; Seifer more defensive and sullen, and they'd ended up not talking. Quistis shot evil glances at Seifer' s back as she tried to decipher the map. Seifer walked in front, breaking the trail and following Quistis' shouted directions.

It was hard work, despite the maps and Seifer's small knowledge of the area. The sketches Gen had drawn were good but the snow covered everything and made the smaller trails harder to find. Quistis wasn't even sure they were on the right path. She wasn't even sure they were on the right mountain.

There were also faint tracks in the snow which were bothering her. She knew that they were bothering Seifer too, though he pretended not to notice. She'd seen him staring at them thoughtfully, one hand slipping under his coat for the weapons that were no longer there and then reaching for cigarettes and lighter.

"Do you think it's a good idea to smoke around here?"

Seifer ignored her.

"There's monsters around. I know you"ve seen them."

No answer.

"It"s getting into the freeze. They should be pretty hungry. You know the SeeD protocols. Nothing to make a sound or leave a scent."

He sighed and shouted at her over his shoulder, arms swinging as he navigated a particularly treacherous piece of rock. "It's my last one. What's your fucking problem now? Look, Quistis, I don't have any other damn thing to do. And what exactly are you expecting me to do when we find a monster? Beat it to death with my bare hands? With luck they're all miles away chowing down on the Galbadians by now."

There was a rustle in the trees off to the left. Seifer ignored it and swung around to face Quistis. "Anyway, we might get shredded by Galbadians at any minute and you're worrying about a few monster tracks . They might be days old! And if the Galbadians are going to find us than a damn cigarette isn't going to make much of a difference."

She raised an eyebrow, drawing her whip in one smooth quick movement.

"There's one right behind me, isn't there?"

Quistis nodded.

He spat the cigarette out, spun to face the monster, hand going under his coat for his knives before the gil dropped and he remembered they're weren't there. The movement turned into a rather impressive roll as the Behemoth roared and swiped at him with a spiked horn.

"Give me a fucking weapon, Trepe?"

"No chance. I can deal with this."

"Fuck, I haven't got time to argue with you. You can't fight that thing alone."

"We"ll see."

She faced up to the Behemoth, dropping her pack and shaking the whip from her belt.

Seifer scowled. "There's caution and then there's just being too damn stupid to admit that you need help."

"Being stupid's your department, not mine." She said and dodged, spinning in the snow as the monster wheeled and charged again and again.

Seifer took a moment to admire her ass, because, dammit, if he couldn't do anything he might as well do something. The behemoth that loomed over her wasn't nearly as pretty. It was easily six feet tall at the shoulder with purple fur or hair or something that curled into a kind of cap over its head. And it was hurtling this way fast.

_Why isn't she using fucking magic on that thing?_

Seifer jumped forwards. He landed in the snow as a part of his mind screamed at him for leaving footprints after they'd been trying hard all damn morning to keep onto the rocks and hide any tracks just in case. He ducked behind a tree as the thing charged again and any thoughts that didn't involve staying alive right now suddenly didn't seem that important.

He grabbed a branch from a tree and jabbed at the monster. The branch bent like spaghetti.

Quistis emerged behind him as silently as a ghost. He almost brained her with the stick.

She raised an eyebrow and threw him a knife.

Seifer grinned. "I hate to say I told you so, but I did."

"Now isn't the time, Sei…." Quistis' words were cut off in mid-insult as she dodged left. Seifer went right. The Behemoth went for the nearest target.

It slammed into Quistis and knocked her aside like a paper doll.

Seifer swore.

The knife looked like a toothpick in his hand despite its footlong blade. He wanted Hyperion; of failing that a proper sword. Something heavy enough to do some damage to this sonofabitch.

He faked a swing to the right. The monster was still watching him, and he risked an anxious glance back to Quistis. She wasn't moving. Her hair spread out on the snow like a halo and hid her face completely. Her com unit lay on the trampled snow in front of the behemoth lowered its head and sniffed the com unit delicately. Steam curled from its nostrils. It took the unit tentatively in its mouth like an after-dinner mint. It bit down.

Crunch.

Seifer groaned. The monster lunged for him and he retreated. It sniffed at Quistis and turned its head aside.

Seifer raised the dagger in a futile gesture. He dived in, aiming for a vulnerable eye, or the thin patch of bone in the middle of its forehead where he could sink his knife through the brittle covering right to the brain.

The behemoth swatted him aside with a casual sweep of its head. The knife flew from his hand. There was a blurred impression of speed and snow and branches pinwheeling across the sky before he slammed into the tree. He hit hard, though his layers of clothing softened some of the fall.

_Shit_, Seifer thought.

The whole left side of his body ached. He felt no broken bones as he dragged himself to his feet and was grateful. There was a stretched out, slightly dopey feeling in his skull that meant he'd probably hit his head too hard. It was nothing he hadn't lived and fought through half a hundred times before.

He had no weapons. His knife lay yards away. Its blade glinted in the setting sun. The behemoth watched curiously. It seemed to have lost interest in Quistis as a chew toy.

The behemoth's eyes focused on him. Seifer could see tiny reflections of himself in its eyes.

Seifer reached out a hand cautiously to the side. The behemoth saw his movement and bellowed. Its hot breath stung Seifer's face. He froze, but kept his hand where it was, ready to run.

Quistis rolled over and coughed. She came around quickly. Seifer watched her hands do the automatic check, com unit, whip, Seifer, none of which were there.

The behemoth flicked its head round and began to move towards her. Seifer dived for his knife. He landed with outstretched fingers a few inches away from the handle, half-rose and snatched it up. Blood made the hilt sticky and the knife almost slid out of his hand before he got a good grip.

Quistis was half lying on the snow. She stared at the monster. Her face was pale against her fur hood. The monster swung its head from motionless figure to figure, looking vaguely puzzled.

"Don't move," hissed Seifer.

Quistis spoke out of the corner of her mouth. "I know that."

The behemoth held still for a second and turned away, obviously bored, or not so hungry after all.

Seifer exhaled and reached for the knife, slipping it up his sleeve again. Quistis rolled over and lay spreadeagled on the snow. Magic glittered between her fingers.

The monster saw the magic and charged. It came towards them slowly, so slowly that at first Seifer did not realise how much ground it was covering in its heavy and ponderous strides. Time seemed to be moving very slowly. Breath puffed in the air in white cartoonish clouds as it bellowed. Quistis flung a spell at the beast. It missed. She dived for her pack. The monster's great head flicked towards her and it changed direction, thundering past as she flung herself behind a tree. The behemoth crashed through the pine easily in a cloud of woodchippings and needles as Quistis lurched to the side. She barely managed to jerk her arm away from the slashing sweep of its horns.

"Cover me! Get it out of the WAY! I need some room here!""

Seifer saw the glow of magic starting to burn into life between her cupped hands. He just had time to think that nothing that big should be able to move that damn fast before he ran out into the clearing and screamed at the creature.

"Over here! You fucking asshole!"

The behemoth spun like a racehorse. A racehorse, Seifer thought, with horns like daggers. If he wasn't careful here he was going to become an instant kebab. A split second and it was almost on him. He could hear the harsh panting of its breath and smell its rank animal sweat.

Seifer waited until he could see the saliva dripping from its mouth. Then he dodged. The horn that should have ripped open his side just slashed the corner of his jacket. His coat caught on the point just for a second, dragging him along as Seifer tried desperately to keep away from the hoves of the creature. The cheap leather ripped and he rolled desperately away; knife still in his hand.

He'd just been demoted from "prisoner" to "bait".

Seifer crawled to his knees, looked around and thanked Hyne that the monster had stopped again thirty feet on the other side of the clearing. His prayer turned to curses as the behemoth charged again. He rolled to one side, terminating in an ungraceful flop as the monster sensed his movement and adjusted accordingly.

This time he didn't bother glancing around; just raced as fast as he could to the other end of the clearing.

Shitshitshitshitshit. This was not good.…

He glanced back at Quistis. She was almost ready to cast. He could feel the hot tingle of the magic in the air around him.

"Come on you bastard! Are you scared?" he screamed.

The monster took the bait.

Seifer dived out of the way just as the behemoth charged full on. Magic burst from Quistis' hands in a blinding flash of light. There was a horrible cracking noise and a bellow. Seifer skidded backwards as the beast lurche towards him. He could smell the metallic stench of the monster's blood as it crashed into him. He had just enough time to think that he was really going to die, until it was over and he hadn"t.

Eventually he let go of the knife.

_So I'm still alive, then._

Seifer didn't know whether to feel pleased or strangely disappointed. He spat blood on the snow, rolled over and flaked out. Black spots danced in his vision. He supposed he should get up and check if Quistis was all right, but he didnt think he could force his body to move. The snow was peaceful. It was quiet. Nobody had tried to kill him for at least ten seconds.

He heard Quistis moving off to his right."Are you all okay?"

"If I said I was dead would you leave me alone?"

"Dead men don't talk."

He sighed. "I'm fine."But he knew he wasn't. He was tired and cold and angry. Angry that he managed to get himself caught, angry that she'd had to save his ass again, angry that he'd got this far all for nothing and that this whole stupid year had been just one long intermission, racking up his crimes because he couldn't do anything else.

Talk about handing them the rope. He"d woven it himself, tied it round his neck with a pretty bow and put the end in their hand.

Seifer realised that he still had the knife. His anger screwed itself up into a lens and focused on the only other person around, hungry for something to strike at.

Quistis hardly saw him move. At the last minute she flung one arm up to protect her face. Her other hand went for her whip, but she was too slow. Seifer slammed up her against the trunk of a tree with the blade of his knife to her throat. "Boot"s on the other foot now, Trepe."

She tried to move her hand enough to get to the points on her wrist, but he leaned his weight on the dagger."Don"t even move. I"ll cut your throat."

"You won't," she said looked lke she believed it.

"I could tie you up," he told her, "and just leave you here."

"But to do that, you"re going to have to let me go. And as soon as you let me go you"ll never get hold of me again. Because you"ll have a headache the size of a small nuclear missile exploding in your skull."

Seifer swore. He'd forgotten, once again, about the transmitter. He knew she had him. And he knew that she knew it too. He hised a curse through his teeth and walked away.

They picked their things up together. An angry silence burned between them which was only broken after everything was packed away and Quistis sat down in the snow and started trying to clean up the cut on her head.

"Let me do it. You"ll only make it worse. And then it'll get infected. Don't think I'm taking myself in."

Quistis gave him a strange look. She looked like she was wondering if it was safe to let him round her head with a sharp instrument. "Okay. need to get out of here."

Seifer knelt down in the snow behind her and started shearing off the hair round the wound with her knife. Locks of blond hair floated in the air.

"How much are you taking off.?"

I"m going to shave your head, Trepe. In revenge."

She put fingers to her head. Seifer cursed. " Leave it, Quistis, you almost had your fingers off. I'm not going to, all right? It was a joke, okay?"

He melted some snow and cleaned the wound roughly and fast, ignoring her winces as the ice-cold water hit the wound."You better be able to walk straight." He rummaged through the med kit. "Doesn"t need stitching…and it's too big for a plaster- oh, hang on." He poured half the bottle of neat iodine on the wound. Quistis howled and pounded her fist against the nearest thing possible, which just happened to be Seifer's thigh. "Do you have any idea just how much that hurt?"

"Better than it getting all infected," he shot back.

Quistis subsided with bad grace. The behemoth lay in the clearing behind them. Its blod had already frozen. It would be gone my nightfall. Neither Seifer nor Quistis had enough energy to search its body for artefacts.

Seifer flicked a glance at the snow. Its pristine whiteness was wrecked by scrapes and bootprints. "Damn. There goes all the hard work trying to keep on the rocks I hope the Galbadians didn't hear that."

"Don"t worry," Quistis said. "They shouldn"t be round here yet."

"They might be. Isn't the motto of the SeeDs 'Be prepared?' Oh, wait, that was the Boy Scouts. Whatever. With Leonhart in charge, it"s probably hard to tell the difference."

He searched his pockets."Shit. Out of cigarettes. Damn monster must"ve trod on them." He found his lighter and flicked it on and off, on and off absently.

Quistis spotted one last little cylinder, miraculously missed by the pounding feet of two mercenaries and one bent down and picked it up, slightly soggy with snow, holding it towards him like miniature peace-offering. "Here."

Seifer accepted the cigarette. "Thanks." The flame of his lighter flared between cupped and gloved hands. He tipped his head back as he inhaled. Smoke hissed between his teeth."Want a drag?"

"No. You shouldn"t smoke those things. They're bad for your health."

" Nnn. Like I"m going to live long enough to have to worry about my lungs."

There was an awkward silence.

"By the way, the com broke."

"I know."

"So….. what now?"

"We just have to make it to the drop point in time," Quistis said.


	6. Chapter Six:Stumbling In

Chapter Six

_I don"t like confiding_

_And I make stupid mistakes_

_Been misled and misguided_

_And I"m easily led astray_

_You can dance with disaster_

_Never missing a step_

_Spinning faster and faster_

_Long after I've already slipped._

Great Big Sea: Stumbling In

Isak hadn"t signed up for this. He'd signed up for glory and honour, not for freezing in a forest. They were chasing a man that should by rights have been easy to find but who had turned a simple search and retrieve mission into a six-week witchhunt. Six fucking weeks. Forty-two days. Isak had never met Seifer Almasy during the wars, but he was really starting to hate his guts.

The first casualty had occurred on day two of the mission; when one of the scouts had failed to return. Cadets Waszowski and McNeill had vanished in the second week. They'd never found the bodies.

He'd found White's body in week four -or rather,what was left of it after the monsters had found it first. He'd heard they'd almost captured the bastard then, though Isak had seen nothing. Two more cadets disappeared the very next day. Monsters started attacking every night. And a bad wound was as good as dead, out here with little magic and no chance of fast transport back to the base camps.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Isak had known some of the soldiers. They'd shared meals, talked about girls and drank beer and played cards round fires on camping trips. Now they were dead.

At the start of the mission Isak had thought he'd make Instructor in a week. He'd heroically manage to corner the fallen knight singlehanded on a picturesque cliff. Headmaster Martine would have pinned the medal on his chest personally.

But none of the stories he'd read had mentioned the cold that seemed to worm its way into your bones. None of them had mentioned the lashing rain that had turned to snow as the Galbadians travelled further north. They slept in damp clothes every night and ate half cooked food. Monsters leapt from every tree, attracted by their footfalls and the blood of wounded men.

Isak was starting to suspect that he was cannon fodder. A few of the corps had started to talk half-heartedly about deserting, but there was nowhere to go even if they'd had the guts to try it.

That night they sat around a blazing campfire. Isak cleaned his weapon again. He thought drearily that the only good thing that had come out of this mission was that he was now able to strip and reassemble a Sig Sauer 9mm in forty-eight seconds, which he reckoned must be worth some kind of medal at least.

Not so far away, voices floated up between lines of fir trees…

"No, what I'd really, really like, is a vodka. A large one."

Quistis sighed. "In cold environments alcohol it decreases your core body temperature and dehydrates you further. It also reduces liver efficiency. Drinking in excess can cause impaired motor functions. That'snot a good idea right now."

"Hyne, can"t you remove the stick from your ass for one minute, Trepe? Don't tell me you're teetotal now. I hate fucking non-drinkers."

"So don't fu.."

Seifer halted her with a gesture. "Don't say it."

"I don't like alcohol." Quistis flipped her hair away from her face, pushing back the hood of her parka and retying it into a loose sloppy knot.

"Everyone drinks some time. It's like …never missing a lecture."

"I never did that either."

"Look," Seifer said. "Some people like something between them and the world. And by some people I mean me." They rounded a corner and the valley spread out in front of them, picture perfect except for the biting wind as they came out of the shelter of the mountain. It was beautiful, and best of all there were no Galbadians. Anywhere.

Quistis analysed the landscape by his side. For a moment she looked almost happy. Seifer sympathised. The prospect of a view containing no imminent death was always a good one.

"Why didn't you use a GF back there?"

She frowned. "I didn't junction one for the mission."

Seifer sighed. "I don't blame you. I don't mind magic-I mean, try everything you"ve got. But maybe I"ve got enough things messing with my head at the moment as it is."

"Reeally?"

"Hex 'em till they glow, then stab em' in the dark." Seifer grinned savagely.

"You're just obsessed with fighting, aren't you?" Qustis said scornfully." Is it evil? Kill it. Not sure? Kill it anyway! What happens when you"re up against something too big to fight?"

"Then it's politics. Not my problem."

She rolled her eyes at him. "I wish life was that simple. I'm tired of wondering whether or not the commands I"m getting are the right thing to do. At least our Garden has some morals. Unlike Galbadia."

"We're mercenaries," Seifer said. "Sure,the whole thing is to protect against the sorceresses but when you get right down to it we're not paid to have morals."

"You're not paid to do anything."

He sighed. "So, I'm not. But I wanted to be. Maybe it's the only thing I"m good at. You don"t have to think. Everything's sorted out for you, everyone knows where their place is. That was what was so great about the sorceress thing. For once in my life I believed I was actually doing some good. Okay, I was brainwashed, and okay, it wasn't the right thing to do anyway, but I knew."

"Did you do it voluntarily?" Quistis asked. She watched him with an unreadable expression.

"I don't know any more," Seifer confessed." I don't even trust my own head. It was like being drunk. Something told me to go with her. And then, well, I've always been good at acting on impulses. Imagine waking up and then finding that you've just been fighting on the wrong side." He paused and tried to explain. "It's not an excuse. Or it won't be. I still did…what I did, they can"t prove I was being screwed with and anyway, even if I was everyone'll say it was my fault for being too damn weak to resist."

"It"ll be a fair trial." Quistis said. She didn't look at him. He wondered why.

"Yeah. Like that's going to work. Do you think I'm just going to say "hey, I'm not an evil person" and they'll believe me?"

"No," Qustis said. "But you could always plead insanity."

"That's a great idea-shit!"

Quistis spun around as Seifer dragged her into the cover of a fir tree. Pine needles scratched his face and sap oozed down his jacket. She pressed against his coat. He inhaled the smell of woodsmoke, sweat, and the coppery undertone of what had to be monster blood.

"Don"t. Fucking. Move," he hissed.

She narrowed her eyes, unimpressed. "Don't make me zap you."

He muffled her mouth with the palm of his hand. He could feel her heart beating rapidly through her clothing. "There"s someone out there. Maybe more than one. Keep still."

"Mmm.!"

"I"m going to let you go. Don"t you even fucking think about trying that thing. "

Quistis coughed, but quietly. "You don't think maybe you"re just paranoid? I can't hear anything."

"Sure. I've had half of the Galbadian army chasing me for six sodding weeks. Of course I'm paranoid. Shh."

"There"s no one there, Seifer," she hissed. "For Hyne's sake, just calm down."

"Shut up!" He scanned the undergrowth. The trees merged in a crazy lattice pattern. There was too much cover. Hyne, he wouldn't notice anything unless it was standing three meters away. Unless something moved, he wasn't going to see a thing.

"Which direction?" she asked.

"Over there. Over that ridge." He jerked his head. The ridge was uremarkable; just a low rise in the ground with a few scrubby bushes on the top. Grass blew gently in the wind. There wasn't much cover, for anything."Hear that?"

"Not if you keep talking…" She fell quiet as her ears picked up a sound that Seifer's hearing, more attuned to forest noise after weeks of solitude, had caught first.

Metal on metal. A human noise.

..clink..

..clink..

There was a faint sound of raised voices. Raised foreign voices. Raised Galbadian voices.

Damn it, Seifer thought .This was so not good. What the hell were they doing here?

"Hyne's-sake!" Quistis hissed quietly. Still. The wind blew the fur hood of her parka round her face.

"You can say that again."

They waited until all the sounds were gone, and then by common consensus, they waited some more.

The evening was fast closing in. The birdsong picked up around them

"They weren't supposed to be here," Seifer said eventually. "They're miles off. They should hand in their scout badges."

The wind blew straight through Isak's coat. It was a lazy wind that couldn"t be bothered to go round but instead cut straight through you. It whipped snow off the thin covering on the ground and made it hard to see.

He heard a noise behind him and whipped his gun up, aiming it at a startled jay that chattered abuse down on him. He sighed and lowered the gunt again. He scanned the ground for footprints.

Nothing here.

What a waste of damn time.

Saying "Okay, we think we"ve got a handle on him, you guys swing round and cut him off while we'll keep on tracking just in case" sounded like a good idea on paper, but out here in the back of beyond it was wildly different. Tracks were easy to follow, as long as the bastard didn't keep to the rocks or cut through any rivers, or they didn't get a fresh fall of snow- but setting a course through these woods was ridiculous. So far they'd had two incidences of injury through friendly fire -nothing too bad, one missing ear and a clipped shoulder and apprehended onesquirrel and two vaguely puzzled deer. At least the deer were edible.

It didn't take much of a brain to decide that he had the hard job. They'd chase Almasy across hundreds of miles of uncharted territory and the knight would be captured at last by the unit waiting at the foothills that hadn't done anything but sit on their asses for seven days, so far. Lucky sods.

He wouldn't have felt so bad about it if it wasn't for the fact that he'd volunteered in a rush of mad public spirit. And now , with nothing to do in the cold dark winter nights except play Triple Triad, he owed Lupe seven thousand gil, and most of his clothes, a bet which she'd said she had every intention of collecting once it was warm again and there were enough people to point and laugh.

Life sucked.

He turned back to camp.

It was getting dark and what little heat there was vanished with the fading sun. Seifer was the first to move. He stretched and leapt silently to the nearest line of exposed rock, trying and failing not to leave footprints. He raised an eyebrow at Quistis and brought one hand straight across in a chopping motion. Quistis nodded and they made their way excruciatingly carefully up the back of the exposed ridge of rock.

When they reached the top she held a hand straight up and they both dropped to their stomachs, crawling the rest of the way.

The air smelled of sharp clean snow, soil, dead leaf litter and smoke. Down below in the shallow valley was the dark outline of a Gal'badian soldier, high up on the other side of the ridge.

Seifer mimed a gun and Quistis shook her head. She pointed at a faint line of smoke a mile or two over to the west. He nodded and pointed back the way they'd come; raised his eyebrows.

Quistis mouthed yes and they crawled back down the sat in the scant cover, trying to think about what to do next.

Quistis got the compass and map out and check their direction. The Galbadians were camped treacherously close to the pickup , she thought.

Seifer squinted at the map and scowled. "I'd swear that's a smaller group. They must have split. What do you bet that there's another lot coming right up on our tail? We should pray for a really heavy fall of snow."

"How long do you think it'll take to go round?

He gave a considered glance at the forest. "A good while. They usually have three rings of outlying scouts. I'd say most of the night, if we want to make sure they don't hear us. Add a few more hours onto that, because unless you can see in the dark we're going to have to take the long way round just to make sure. And that's assuming we don't bump into anything nasty. Which we will. It's not a good idea to travel at night."

"Do they change guards?"

"Fuck, I don't know." He thought. "You know, I don't think they do. I got one of them when he was asleep."

"Remind me to tell you about combat honour sometimes," Quistis said.

"Maybe when I'm not outnumbered fifty to one."

She decided not to waste her breath. According to her watch, they had twelve hours before the transport was due. They'd barely make the location by Seifer's estimateNot enough time to cut round. And with no com, she couldn't even risk sending out a message. "There can't be another landing point for miles in these forests. Why do you think it took them so long to catch up?"

"I just thought it was my superior survival skills."

"Mmm." Quistis made a noncommittal noise. They were still taking quietly, in whispers. Seifer"s breath hummed close to her ear in little white frosty clouds and despite herself she shivered.

"What"s that supposed to mean?"

"It means", Quistis said," we have a plan."


	7. Chapter Seven:Sympathy

Chapter Seven

_It's hard to lead the life you choose  
All I wanted  
When all your luck's run out on you  
All I wanted  
You can't see when all your dreams are coming true_

_Oh yeah, it's easy to forget, yeah  
You choke on the regrets, yeah  
Who the hell did I think I was?_

GooGoo Dolls: Sympathy.

"And your plan is?" Seifer and Quistis walked back the way they'd come.

She shook her head at the tracks they'd left in the snow, cutting a pine branch to sweep over the prints. "Listen. We already have an advantage."

"Which is?" Seifer jumped back to let her sweep the branch over a long scrape where he'd fallen off a rock. "And give me that twig. Im walking in the back. "

"We know where we are. And they don"t. And we know where they are."She handed him the branch.

"So?"

"We wait until the guards are really tired. And then, if we're quiet and lucky, we just walk straight through. They'll never hear us." Quistis counted silently as she waited for expected explosion. It wasn't long in coming, but it was at an admirably reduced volume.

"I can't believe I just wasted three fuckin'seconds of my valuable life listening to you explain that. Quistis, that sucked. Damn, Angelo could do better than that. I.."

Quistis cut him off with a well placed branch full of snow. "So. Do better."

There was a long pause as Seifer stared at her, spitting snow from his mouth. Finally he shrugged and turned away, letting her go first again as they clambered over a pile of boulders "I can't .But they must be pretty shit. They're supposed to be tracking me but instead here we are nearly walking right into

them. I mean, I couldn't track us, but you get someone used to this place, someone local, they could do it, no problem. "

Quistis sighed. "I don't think they're all that bad. You said yourself it's a smaller group than you though, plus we've changed direction. What I'd do in this situation is to try and predict which way you were going and then cut you off. So maybe that's what they're doing. "

"Then we're both gonna die."

"Always the optimist."

"If you make it, could you keep my coat?" he suggested. "Every so often you could take it out and look

at it romantically and think about me. That'd be great. You could sniff it if you'd like. Of course, you'd have to patch over the bullet holes."

"Seifer." Quistis voice could have frozen water at a glance."We should rest here."

He looked round. Quistis faced a rocky overhang that made up one side of the little hollow they stood in. It provided cover and shelter, and a flat spot to pitch the tent. It was about a mile from the Galbadians.

"Hang on, what about the plan? When did we sign up to do this?"

"When you couldn't think of a better one. We haven"t really got much choice."

He shrugged. "You could just give me a few hours start, then go up to thenearest sentry and shout "He went that way!""

"You must be joking. You're not important enough to waste my career on."

"Nothing"s important enough to waste your damn career on. I"m just your instructor's ticket. Hell, it"s your life. What would you do if you couldn"t be a SeeD any more?" Seifer threw his bag down. He looked up at Quistis just in time to watch her face go white.

He'd meant the last remark as just another comment in the seemingly endless verbal conflict that had been their conversation so far, but it must have hit its mark. What he'd thought was just another piece of idly tossed shrapnel turned out to be an anti-aircraft missile.

What had he said now?

"Do you know if I'm identified this could lead to the biggest political incident since the Sorceress' Wars?" she said. "Two Gardens both sending forces after a war criminal who"s supposed to be twelve months dead? Covert forces? Special ops? This could be the ticket our critics have been waiting for. Inter-Garden conflict…"

"Aren"t you just a fuckin' soldier? Leave that politics stuff to the big guns."

"It"s all politics. Every damn thing we do. You should know that." she fired back. "If I get demoted again, I"m telling you, that is it. No more chances. If this goes wrong, they'll fire me. They'll have to."

He shrugged. "So what?Quistis, you're twenty. Garden isn't all that's out there, for Hyne's sake. You can

do other things."

"Like you? I don't want to be a civilian. I dont want to be a murderer or whatever else you spent your last twelve months doing in that fleapit of a city."

Point to her, Seifer thought silently.

"I haven"t got anything outside Garden. I have to do this, Seifer. I don't hate you. I'm doing it because it's my job."

Seifer decided that he was too tired for this. He slammed his bag down and wrenched out the tent poles, avoiding looking at her. In Garden, he'd have walked away. Slammed the door. If he was in Garden, he wouldn't have been out here.

Bitch.

The tent poles snapped into silence of two people mutually ignoring each other filled the clearing.

Whe it was finally erected, Seifer sat down in the doorway, wishing he could smoke, and flicking matches out of the tent door.

Quistis built the fire carefully into a tiny and perfect textbook meticulously adjusted one of the logs.

A match nose-dived into the damp moss and pine-needles of the forest floor near her boot.

Another match sizzled through the air close to Quistis left ear.

He wanted to light the fire? She'd show him how to light the damn fire.

Quistis searched her memory. It would be a waste of magic, but they just had twelve hours left, and Hyne, was she counting them down. She paced away from the camp, like she was searching for more firewood, pretending to be absorbed in finding just the right length of branch to add to the lips moved in a silent rhythm.

She waited until he leant out of the tent and then whirled, bringing her hands together. Flames burst from her palms. The fire leapt three feet in the air, sending orange sparks showering into the clearing and hissing up into the gathering dusk.

Seifer leapt back. "What'd you fucking do that for?"

She smiled. Seifer lashed out with a boot, swearing under his breath, sending showers of sparks and

bonewhite ash from the mostly burntout logs flying. The sparks flowered briefly in the snow, and then died with a hiss and a spiral of soggy smoke.

Quistis drew back, twisting so none of the sparks landed on her parka with a reactionthat was automatic. Her hand went to her wrist, slipping under her coat sleeve to the two pressure patches. Seifer flinched.

Quistis automatically drew her hand back, face burning with a mixture of surprise,embarrassment and shame as she watched his eyes flicker with relief, and then a more complex mix of emotions. She didn't move as he stood up, fast, and pushed past her, coat swirling behind him like an angry dark cloud.

"Where are you going?"

"Get more fuckin" wood."

She heard him crashing about in the undergrowth and hoped nothing was about. They were too far for the Galbadians to hear them, or at least she hoped so

Seifer stamped through the trees. It was dark. He didn"t care.

Bitch.

He swung, punched a tree and splinters of wood whined through the air, his fingers sticky with something that might have been crunched under his feet. Like broken ribs, cracked skulls, peanut shells.

The memories, like the dark, came crushing in again, too close. Seifer rubbed his eyes, squeezing them shut against the pressure as spirals and blots of light flowered against his retina. Yeah, great. What a life.

He grabbed some dead wood off the floor, snatching his hand back as it touched thorns.

The circle of light glowed invitingly behind him. Quistis was hunched up by the fire, which was mostly down to coals. She looked miserable, all huddled coat and sleek pale hair. She rested her head on her arms and watched the waning flames. They reflected in the frames of her glasses.

He shrugged, and turned away, searching for more wood. Aaa, well, everyone had a weak spot.

Seifer wondered if he was the only one that remembered everything about their childhood. He didn"t think so, but the chances of meeting any of the gang in a situation where he"d be able to talk about it were slimmer than an anorexic teenager.

Maybe he better be nice.

Quistis scuffed over the ashes of the fire, lost in thought. She blew hair out of her mouth. She'd lost her temper and her mind. She should have known better.

But she'd been tired, and he'd hit her in just the right spot.

She looked up as Seifer emerged from the trees carrying more twigs.

"You know, life outside Garden's not all bad. You don't have to do the "will work for food, kill for money"thing." He settled down against the rock wall at the side of the tent. The stone still reflected

the heat of the tiny fire, though it was bitterly cold."Not if you don't want to."

Quistis gave Seifer a baleful glare and a non-committal "Mmm."

He set more twigs on the fire, cupping hands around the small pile that glowed with a sudden golden tinge as he flicked his lighter onto the pine-needle tinder.

Quistis gazed up at the moon, or where it should have been, the sky darker than velvet with heavy clouds, threatening rain, or snow, more likely, at this high altitude.

Seifer followed her gaze. "We better hope it doesn't snow again. We might as well leave a fuckin sign. That is, if they didn"t see your little fireworks display."

He watched Quistis intently. She seemed okay now. There was still a look in her eyes that indicated she wasn't having a good day, year, or life, but at least she didn"t look so damn miserable.

Hyne, when had he started caring what the hell she felt like anyway?

"If you hadn"t started playing around with matches..." Her voice was waspish and bitter, but hell, he could deal with that. He internally grinned. Now that was more like it. And that was the moment his stomach chose to remind him that he hadn't eaten since this morning. "Got any food?"

She flicked a hand at her bag. "Help yourself."

He pulled the rucksack awkwardly towards him to avoid getting up and flipped back the top, sorting through spare raincoats, matches, the silvery foil of space blankets,water purification pills and just about everything the well-equipped mercenary could wish for in the woods. Beneath the neatly folded clutter was a box, which proved to contain, on investigation, six or seven foil-wrapped ration bars with an impressively long list of E-numbers on the packaging.

Seifer threw one to Quistis, who caught it neatly between cupped palms, and then ripped the wrapper off the nearest one. It tasted like cherries made of plastic.

Halfway through he noticed she was staring at him. "Wass' matter?"

"Don"t you chew?" She crumbled little bits of her bar and ate them neatly. Somehow crumbs didn"t even seem to stick to her gloves. Figured. The New Improved Instructor Trepe. Now wipe-clean.

"Not at a fucking dinner party."

"Don"t think you"re getting the kiss of life when you choke."

"Kiss of death."

"Har har."

He ripped open another bar, hoping she wouldn"t notice, and changed the subject."What time do you want to set off?"

Quistis laid her lunch in her lap, chewed (neatly, with her mouth closed) and then swallowed before talking. "About two, three a.m.. Make it two-forty five. It'll take us at least half an hour to get to the camp, and I don"t want us anywhere near there when the sun comes up."

"Want someone on watch?"

"Let me think. We"re in unknown territory with hostile forces less than a mile away. Of course. That's protocol. Regulations. Common sense."

"I"ll take first." He felt slightly awkward, offering, as Quistis raised one eyebrow. Now that had to be a look she"d practised in front of a mirror.

"Fine. Only don't get any ideas about going anywhere."

"Like I'm stupid."

"I won"t say it...Anyway, give me your pack, then. I"ll check the kit."

He shrugged, thinking it was just fine, but then, if she wanted to do it, fine with him. Heaved the pack at Quistis and she caught it in one smooth movement, crawling into the tent past him. Seifer swatted her on the ass as she passed and then looked innocent when she spun round. Because there were some things a man just had to do, dammit.

"Fallen, uh, pine-cone".

Her eyes glinted evilly behind her spectacles with the promise of retribution, but she didn"t say anything. Seifer did a mental victory dance. Point, and score.

Inside the tent, Quistis broke open a glowstick inside the tent as she laid out equipment on the groundsheet. Everything seemed to be intact except the smashed com device, carefully wrapped in a

plastic Zip-lock bag, with its electronic innards spilling out as she opened it. It didn"t matter, the transport should be there, and Garden could monitor where they were via Seifer"s skull transmitter, but it would have been nice to know. Her hands went through the almost automatic motions of folding and checking items as she adjusted the load. The tent wouldn"t take long to take down, and it could

go right in the top. The last things to go in were the weapons she'd taken off Seifer, and she hesitated a minute before tucking them down the side of her bag. Oh, what the hell. Her fingers brushed the worn leather holster as she considered. Why not? They might need all the help they could get.

Quistis strapped the holster on over her heavy padded overtrousers, her fingersfumbling inside her thick gloves as she tightened it to its smallest hole, although it still hung baggily round her hips. After a moment"s thought she took one of the knives from where she'd stuffed it down the side of the pack and regarded it closely. It wasn's much to look at but it was a beautifully weighted weapon, the handle of the horn of some animal, worn and polished with use, and the blade thin from many sharpenings. She tucked itinto her coat sleeve and then crawled backwards out the tent, half-expecting another

slap as she pivoted round, keeping her balance, ready for a violent and wrathful retaliation that wasn't necessary.

Seifer was hunched up next to the small fire, staring into the flames. His eyes reflected the leaping gold-red light. His face looked tired, drawn and pale beneath his ever present tan,a man in serious need of some Nytol.

"Are you all right?" Quistis asked quietly.

Seifer started, rocked back on his heels and almost fell over. "Yeah. Just ..thinking. Go to sleep. I"m not getting shot if you fall asleep on your feet. We"ve got to get going in a couple of hours. "

She shot him an evil glance. "Do you remember where you came from? Before the orphanage, I mean?"

"Why should I? I was five. SeeDs are lucky if they can remember what they had for breakfast yesterday. Everyone knows that. "He raised one hand and scratched at hishair, idly. Dried red-black flakes of blood fell out.

"But you didn't use any GFs." she pointed out.

"What makes you think I want to, anyway?"

"Use GFs?"

"No. Remember. Why do you want to know something like that at a time like this?"He sighed. "Fuck off."

Quistis turned back into the tent, unbuckling the holster from around her hip. "You better have these." There was a soft clink of metal and leather as she put the gun down on the

snow next to Seifer and pulled the knife out from her coat, laying it on top. "Don"t get any ideas. You're going to need them." She turned back into the tent.

"Quistis?"

"Yeah"

"Have you seen Raijin and Fuu? Since the wars?"

Quistis answered the question he didn"t ask "They're all right, Seifer." She could only see his silhouette through the thin walls of the tent, his expression, therefore, unreadable, but she thought he relaxed a little. "Fuujin made SeeD almost a year ago. Raijin last month."

His voice was edgy. Tentative. "It didn"t make any difference..what happened?"

She chose her words carefully. "Well, after it all happened, I mean, they forgave Edea. I think they got a bit of flak from the other students, but Cid gave a big speech about how loyalty was important and how we should all try to put our pasts behind us and work together for a new Garden. I think a lot of SeeDs did things they weren't proud of, during the wars."

There was a long silence.

Quistis coughed awkwardly, trying to break it, and Seifer ignored her, thinking, wishing he was smoking, just wanting to be left alone.

Eventually she got the message said good night and disappeared into the darkness of the tent. They were going to have to leave in a few hours, to make it to the camp at three am or thereabouts, when the night was at its deepest and the sentries were falling asleep at their posts. Seifer had never been good at sleeping, not for a long time,and even less since the wars, and she looked tired, and …. well, he"d volunteered.

_Do you remember?_

Not all that much, thank Hyne. But more than she did, most likely. Nosy fucking bitch. Only a little from before Edea and the orphanage, or maybe it was just that he'd pushedall the memories down inside, …storms, sand, blood, hard hands, snivelled tearful drunken apologies, and the wariness that always came from never knowing whichone it was going to be. After that, things became a little clearer.

The other kids, of course, he'd always remember them. Not that he'd ever said anything, the past was best left buried, live for the present and all that. Never something he was proud of. Not the kind of scars you joked about in the locker room, how the girls liked them, medals of bravery. Just a little kid, too scared and stupid to see what was happening right in front of his eyes, and then, even stupider, thinking he could change it.

And afterwards, when he"d tried and failed and made it worst, just about as bad as it could ever be, the orphanage, Edea, all the there he'd stayed, despite all the attempts of Edea to get him adopted like the other kids. Too old, too…damaged, too aggressive, ill behaved,violent, disruptive for the people that came.

Squall had been there too, already not caring all over it all. No one had wanted him, had gone fairly early.

He wondered, idly, what her life had been like, turning the thought over and over in his head like a piece of glass that cut skin.

Wherever she went, she"d never talked about it. If she had, the Trepies would have known, and then Seifer would have known through Fuu and Raijin and the channels ofenvy and gossip and jealousy that ran half hidden beneath the placid surface of any group of people living together in close contact, all year round, all the time.

Somewhere in Balamb, she'd never had an accent to lose, those clipped vowels and precise turns of phrases.

He wasn"t so stupid to think that it had been good- all pink sheets and teddy bears and …whatever girls were supposed to like. Frills. Dolls. Teaparties. Mommy's little girl didn't get sent to the army at twelve, to learn how to be a trained killer. Or maybe it had been even earlier, for her, with the child prodigy thing and all. Get them whilethey're young, start them small, monsters, group missions, lessons and training and then before you know it you're fifteen or sixteen and practising your newfound skills. Bigger

and faster monsters. More of them. Training all the time, lessons on tactics and politicsand how to hit things and kill them or not kill them or just break bones or use magic.

Until one day you finally got to test what they"ve been teaching you on a human, on a person and they bled just the same, sometimes even easier, no spikes or fangs or poison.

And you just went right on doing it.

What the hell had Garden been thinking? Sure it all started with the sorceresses, but had no one thought it might be a bad idea to teach adolescents to be trained killers, and kick out the ones with bad attitudes that they couldn't use with no visible means of support once they hit twenty?

Seifer wondered what would have happened if he'd failed all the exams and then he'd just got too old to stay. If the sorceress shit hadn't happened. Maybe they"d have offered him a job as a janitor or something.

At the time he hadn"t been able to understand it, he'd known he was a hell of a lot better than most students there ( which had maybe been the problem), and he'd watched them all pass, and move on, while he"d been stuck behind and man had it grated.. No matter how hard he'd covered it up with violence and bravado. He'd just wanted to make something of his life. Be famous.

His hands scratched at the snow, tracing something idly, a line, a diamond shape.

A fire cross.

He scrubbed it out with his coat sleeve.

It was cold out here, despite the fire that was little more than coals. Hi breath formed tiny clouds of ice crystals. The invisible presence of Quistis in the tent was oddly reassuring, even if her presence was dragging things up from his past he"d thought were long buried.

Seifer drew the knife Quistis had given him and used the blade to scrape at the transmitter in his skull carefully, craning his head forwards. A few shorn dirty blond hairs drifted onto the snow before he sighed and put the knife down. No use. Run, he'd get caught. Wind up stumbling into the middle of a scout party, or freezing to death in some Hyneforsaken cave. Looking like a fool. Infamy wasn't what

He'd wanted, but it was a hell of a lot better than obscurity.

He"d always known he"d go back to Garden eventually. Nowhere else. And there was only so many times you could lose before you became a loser.

Damn.

What was it about the dark silent hours between one and four am. that made you think bollocks?

He"d heard that most people died at that time, easiest to let go and forget what you had in the daylight. It was suicide time, when everything seemed worse than it was. And it was far too easy to be alone with your thoughts, out here with nothing to look at except the dying embers of the fire and the darkness. So fucking dark out here. Not like the city. There'd been times during the last six weeks, that he"d been happier to see the sun risethan he cared to admit. Ever.

So he sat and watched out for Galbadians and tried to think of nothing. The wind rose, howling in the trees like a damned soul, and Seifer shivered, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his coat closer around him.

It sounded like a sea. A storm. Just like a sea in a storm. He imagined wind-tossed waves, scattering white spindrift foam and dark sky. Sand grating on bare feet and tossed up stinging into your face, eyes smarting with the salt that caked rough on chapped lips and for a minute the night smelled of fish and iodine seaweed and dead rotting things. Dead men, haunting the darkness behind his eyes.

He scuffed some sticks in a circle and traced them into shapes, a square, a circle, a little man, mind determinedly blank, and then burnt them in the ashes.

The glowing letters of Quistis" watch winked at him.

Twelve midnight.

Dammit, Seifer thought.

It was midnight and Isak was on watch. He stood in the shadow of a particularly large fir tree, occasionally checking the gun at his side, and stared out into the dark.

Huh.

It was great being able to hit a bird's eye at a hundred yards, but that shit didn't work if you couldn"t see anything. It was blacker than pitch out there, and cold. It was hard to forget the cold.

Fortunately he had one of the last remaining pairs of night vision goggles left to the team, but even with them the view just resembled a carefully arranged green tangle, with the occasional flash of light reflected from the eyes of some small animal.

_I shouldn"t be afraid. I shouldn"t be afraid._

_I"m a member of one of the most feared mercenary fighting forces in the world._

The faint glow from the fires of the main encampment, a magnesium-bright glare in his night goggles, gave him some reassurance. His hand cramped on the buttof the gun, and he shifted it, flexing his fingers.

Four bloody hours of watch left.

Five past midnight.

Three hours, fifty five minutes of watch left. Isak held his breath experimentally, timing himself and watching the scene in front of him. Sixty seconds, sixty-one, sure is cold out here. Sixty-eight, remember

to check the sky…which stayed clear from aerial assault, stars burning briefly in the dark.

His breath frosted in clouds in the air, appearing as a pale green nebula in the night goggles.

Seventy-nine seconds. Not bad. And if he looked out he could pinpoint the positions of the other guards. Three rings of them. Was that really necessary?

What was all the use of learning tactics and techniques if they were just going to be standing around? He should have become a damn security guard. At least you got time off.

Time off. Heh

Isak briefly thought of the special assignment pay that was racking up inhis account. Just by standing here, for one hour, ten minutes I've made….he briefly calculated..four gil.

That would buy him half a beer.

A beer. He was going to have a beer when he got back home

Maybe he'd have two beers.

He shook himself. He had to concentrate. The future fortunes of the Galbadian Garden were resting on him.

He scratched his ass.

Maybe he should go get some cocoa.

Isak tracked noisily back to the camp so everyone heard him and didn't mistake him for a murderous ex-mercenary trying to sneak by in the night. Some cocoa was still steaming on an impromptu pot-holder made of twigs and bootlaces thathad been left over the dying fire.

He scooped up a cup from a pile that someone had thoughtfully left nearby andquietly ladled some up. It tasted like crud and had obviously never seen a cocoabean in its no doubt long and exciting life, but it was hot.

He carried it back to his post, where it steamed gently on the floor, getting cold as he slid down with his back to the tree and lit a cigarette. The night vision goggles exploded with a small supernova at the lighter's flame. Isak ripped them off and cursed. The movement made the cigarette held loosely between his teeth drip ash into his cocoa.

Isak sighed, looked at it, and drank it anyway.


	8. Chapter Eight: Forty Miles From The Sun

Chapter Eight

_As darkness craves the mind,_

_We are undone without our pride._

_No time on earth to come_

_All the pleasure's just begun_

_Forty miles from the sun_

_In our coats beneath the layers_

_Wash my skin of all the hate_

_We should sleep late_

_Everything just kind of grates_

_Forty miles from the sun…._

Bush-Forty miles from the sun.

Squall. Naked Squall

Quistis smiled.

A hand descended on her shoulder. "Quistis? It's three a.m."

Seifer.

She groaned.

"Quistis, did you just try to grope my hand? Dreaming about me?."

She groaned again. It felt like a parrot had just been sleeping in her mouth. An incontinent cracked one eye open and glared at Seifer in the doorway. She was more or less resigned to never getting to lie in on missions, and her normal six am start she normally had no problem with, but..damn..she was tired. And no coffee.

Coffee.

Three am.

Despite the fact that she had no other visible vices, Quistis loved coffee. Loved coffee with such a passion that several of the more observant Trepies' fantasy lives involved reincarnating as Quistis Trepe's bedside coffee maker.

She shrugged out of her sleeping bag and winced as the warm air rushed in to fill the place where her body heat had been. Sleeping fully clothed had its advantages. A deep breath and a few seconds later and she tied on her boots with cold stiff fingers. Seifer dragged down the tent behind her. He turned as she got up and shoved a tin into her hand. A similar tin was lying crushed in the fire.

"Found this in your bag."

The smooth metal surface beneath her fingers was beginning to heat up as she turned it round, curiously, trying to make out the writing on the can in the embers of the fire. After all, she wouldn't put it past him to giver her a can of baked beans, and then laugh as she took a big swallow.

The scent was familiar. She caught a glimpse of the label in the night. Coffee. Self-heating. Thank Hyne.

Quistis took a large swallow and sighed, dragging her sleeping bag out of the tent and packing it into her stuffsack. Bag compressed, and system re-caffeinated, she turned to Seifer. "Any problems?"

"No," he eyes were ringed with dark smudges, underneath the dirt and stubble. Quistis thought about saying something, but when he turned his back on her in an adamant I-don't-want-to-know way to sweep snow over the fire she decided to leave it.

They finished packing the rest of the camp fast and in silence, working by the light of glowsticks and by touch. Seifer didn't even try to feel her ass again. Quistis was worried, just a little bit. Seifer had the abstracted look of someone who had just been mugged down Memory Lane.

"Are you sure?" She forgot to lower her voice and then mentally clapped a hand over her mouth. The sounds they were making were lost in the rising wind, but even…..well., what was she thinking. She hadn't been.

Must have caught it off Seifer.

"Shh. I'm bloody fine. What the hell are you so worried about?" Seifer half-turned. The light from the glowsticks traced a faint shadow over his cheekbone. "Trepe, are you looking at me funny? Wake up." He reached over, knocked gloved knuckles on the top of her head and quickly swiped them back as Quistis turned round "Don"t do that."

He shrugged. "You look like someone's just hit you over the fucking head. Since when do I have to organise things round here? We better go."He shouldered his pack and turned away, all ragged coat, steel toecaps and determination.

Quistis picked up her pack and followed. "I hope they don't want you that badly," she whispered.

Seifer shrugged again. "How dedicated are they? One charge of trying to End The World plus associated charges. Six counts of first degree murder, …twenty three counts of being Drunk and Disorderly back in Marduk, plus Being found Drunk, Being found Very Drunk, Using Offensive Language, Using Language that was Probably Offensive if anyone else could understand it, Malicious Lingering, Committing a Breach of the Peace...Don't give me that look."

She sighed. "Seifer, you ARE a breach of the peace."

"Think they'll let me off with a pardon? I"ve stopped running." He smiled, a bitter savage grin that somehow managed to disconcert rather than hold any vestige of humour. He looked down at his feet and then glanced up at Quistis.

They continued on in silence after that.

As they crested the rise, Quistis hissed at Seifer to get down, and he flattened immediately. She turned her head slowly to the right and pointed at a guard. He was a dark silhouette in the even darker night, a source of almost inaudible sounds-the rustle of clothing, the scrape of boot against rock, the creak of leather.

She waved a hand to the left, keeping it in and close to her body, relying on the vegetation to screen their movements. He crawled after her, the gun at his hip. The air smelled of snow and wet earth, sharp green cold smells and the wind that was rising. Quistis risked a cautious glance behind them. There was no movement in the shadows. The tiny sounds softened and faded into the distance

One down, two to go.

They crept forwards through the Galbadian lines.

Seifer squinted after Quistis and rose to a wary crouch. The wind whipped at his coat. He grinned in the dark. A wind would mask any sounds that they might make.

That was the point, Seifer realised afterwards, that it all started to screw up. It felt like he had an itch in his brain. He shook his head, blindly, half expecting to hear something rattle round in there. Dammit.

Time to go crazy, on top of everything else.

Something watched them.

Its gaze scanned out across the mountains it had seen before a hundred million times. It saw a man and a woman, ghosting through the trees. There was a soldier they hadn't seen yet close to their right.

But it was so weak, and spiderweb threads of old memories and the echoes of feet in dusty halls was all it had had for so long. The lives of the humans burned so brightly. The monster was drawn to them like a moth to the flame.

It waited patiently, and watched.

Its vision d absolutely nothing to do with eyes, and nothing more to do with the echolocation of a bat or the infrared vision of a snake, but it might have been a combination of them all, if such could be done..

It had been so long.

There was a pack of wolves not far away. The monster sent out the last remains of its power, hoping it might …what, it didn"t really know, having no words yet, blind vestige of past dreams as it was.

It spoke, and the wolves, although they didn't know it, listened.

Isak shivered.

It was twenty past three in the morning. He stared off into the darkness, his mind spinning lazy thoughts like a half-asleep hamster on a wheel.

There was a small noise off to his left.

He crouched forwards, hunkering down, and peered along the low ridge in front of his post through the trees. He heard it again, above the wind. The sound was a harsh, low sighing, like something breathing, if the thing in question had been struck down with laryngitis.

He whipped his head round,his hand going for his gun. Adrenaline sang through tired veins. The gun was in his hand before he even realised he'd drawn it.

Far off to the left, there was a scream. Isak rose from his crouch and prowled silently along the ridge. He checked his back constantly, spinning, weaving between pools of shadow and bare trackless patches of snow.

Something winked in his goggles, down the bottom of the ridge. There was a sudden small rustle in dry vegetation that drew his eyes.

He pulled his gun and sighted on the spot, and then sighed as a large black dog stepped out of the clearing.

A wolf.

Just a wolf.

Isak reached up a hand to the focus control on the side of his head. He twisted the knob of the night vision goggles and focused in. The wolf walked towards him fluidly. He slid the goggles up on his forehead and rubbed at his face, while his brain frantically tapdanced behind his eyes. There was something not right about the animal's confidence.

Isak's breath frosted in the air.

The animal's didn't.

Two other shadows joined the first out of the bushes either side of the ridge. The wolves were large and black. They moved with a sinuous purposeful grace as they flanked the lead creature and trailed towards him. They left no footprints behind them, but Isak suddenly knew with a dead sick kind of certainty that their teeth would slice just fine.

Everything started to happen very fast.

He pulled his trigger. The bullets passed through the animals as if they weren't even there.

He shot at the wolves until he ran out of bullets, loaded more and then shot again. He might as well have been shooting air.

Look out for Almasy, they'd told him. Almasy and monsters. Nothing about freaky ghost wolves.

Isak's hands fumbled the familiar signs of magic. He realised he was shouting, in fear or rage or just to prove that he was still alive, and that there were other shouts.

He managed to focus and cast.

The magic whited his goggles out with the dead sizzle of frying circuitry and he ripped them off with a curse, regretting it immediately as his vision tried to accustom to the darkness and to the close proximity of three now very large very fast animals coming towards him at full speed.

Isak did what any sensible man would ran.

The Galbadian camp was in trouble before they even reached it.

"What the hell?" Seifer spoke without moving his head from his arms as they both rested against a tree.

"Someone"s got a problem."

"Yeah. Us."

Quistis glanced round the tree. "That"s not it. There's something haven't even seen us."

"Looks like they're under attack." Seifer joined her, staring out at the camp."Shit. Quistis, some fucker"s throwing grenades."

"I know." She shaded her eyes with her hand. "Looks like…wolves."

"Monsters? They're asking for it in such a big group out here. They want their fuckin' heads testing."

She shook her head. "No, just wolves."

"Pussies." Seifer watched as a Galbadian soldier ran from a blazing tent. He fired abstractly as a dark shadow that followed him, drawing back, attacking. The soldier ran on, coming closer, turning round every so often to fire. Someone in the distance shouted orders. "Think they"re theirs? The things? Let's ask them."

"I don't think so." Quistis said. She realized that she was talking to Seifer's back. He crept forwards towards the soldier. He spun around as Seifer approached and she watched his face open up in relief before he realized that Seifer wasn't wearing any uniform. His hand moved to his gun. He frowned. "You're-"

Seifer decked him. Quistis heard the crunch of the soldier"s nose as cartilage collapsed. The Galbadian went down as if poleaxed.

Seifer crouched down in the snow beside him and started emptying his pockets of ammunition and grenades.

"Carry all those," Quistis called, "and you won"t be able to walk straight, let alone fight."

He glanced up. "Not planning to hang on to them for long. Now we're equal. They're being hunted, and so are we. But just what the fuck are those wolves?"

She scowled at him. "You're enjoying this far too much."

He shrugged. "It"s just nice to hit something."

She bent down, unzipped the collar of the Galbadian's uniform and felt for a pulse. "Good. He's not dead."

"Give me a second, he will be."

"How can you say that?"

Seifer grinned. "Easily. If I'm outnumbered ten to one, I"d at least like the guys who I"m trying to kill not to try to kill me. It evens it out."

Quistis wondered just where the old idealistic Seifer had gone and left in his place this cynical, battle scarred soldier. One minute he"d be fine, on top of the world like the old Seifer. The next moment he'd be ablaze with a frayed rage that seemed to simmer just under the surface. Experience, maybe, but she wasn"t sure it was an improvement.

She noticed him going through the pockets of the coat in the hope of finding any loose change. "Seifer. Really. We don't need cash."

His eyes flicked to the side in a distant kind of way, as if he was looking for something that wasn"t even there. "Behind you."

Quistis spun. A black wolf stood there with its jaws open. She drew Save the Queen. It charged.

Quistis stepped sideways in one fluid movement and snapped the whip in a straight line across the wolf's eyes.

It didn't flinch.

Quistis snapped the whip down again with a force that could have sliced flesh. The wolf growled.

Seifer raised his gun, sighted in one movement with the ease of long practice, and put a bullet neatly between the wolf's eyes. There was a shower of splintered bark as the bullet hit the tree behind the wolf. It snapped its head round and charged for Quistis.

She spun to face the thing, neatly vaulting it as its teeth snapped at empty air. She landed close to Seifer, leaving deep prints in the snow and then dodging to the side. Seifer pulled the pin on the first grenade with his teeth and then the other two on quick succession. He flung them behind Quistis, and they both turned and ran.

Quistis glanced over her shoulder as they dived for cover. She caught a quick glimpse of the creature sniffing at the nearest grenade before it detonated.

The shock wave pushed them both off their feet.

Quistis landed on top of Seifer, her nose buried in his evil-smelling coat. backShrapnel and woodchip whined past her head and a sliver of bark sliced a long groove over her leg, through the trousers. She hardly noticed it.

The clearing they had just been in was a smoking wreck, a neat crater chopped out of the hillside and the trees, with bits of flaming branch crashing to the ground and sizzling out in the snow.

The wolf's shoulder broke through the wall of flames. It snarled and charged again.

Seifer grabbed her, throwing an arm protectively over her head. He threw them both to one side. The thing"s teeth raked a long scar along the sleeve of his already tattered jacket. He shoved the barrel of the gun up against its belly and pulled the trigger. The blast knocked it back slightly but there was no damage.

They stumbled to their feet together. The wolf feinted in front of them, its ears laid back.

Quistis slid one foot backwards without taking her eyes off the creature.

And right at that minute a party of Galbadian soldiers came through the trees to their left. Quistis saw the shock on Seifer"s face, clearly illuminated by the flames of the burning trees.

The head of the wolf swung from one group of potential targets to another.

"Stop!" somebody called from the Galbadian ranks. "You're under arrest!"

Seifer snarled "Bite me." Quistis jerked him back by the collar of his coat as bullets whined through the trees.

"Which way?"

She pointed, at what she though was the right way. "Run"

Seifer scowled at her. "Fucked if I"m going with them. They want a fight, they"ll damn well get one."

"Run!"

They ran with the flares of magic at their back. Quistis crashed through a veil of last year's dead nettles, fell, rolled, and was up and running again in seconds. Dark shapes crashed through the brush behind them. Quistis noticed that not all of them were human. "Keep going!" she screamed at Seifer.

More bullets and magic whined through the night behind them.

Seifer looked around for Quistis.

She wasn't there.

There was a sudden flash of light in front of him. Seifer stopped, fast, his boots slipping on wet rock. He dragged an arm across his face to shield his eyes. He raised his pistol, not knowing or caring what the hell was in front of him and hoping he wasn"t about to blow a hole in Quistis but whatever it was had better get out of his way. Fast.

He stared down the barrel of another gun. Snow gleamed wetly on the stee. It was as bright and as cold as the eyes of the soldier staring down the other end at him. A captain, from the insignia on his torn Galbadian scout uniform. Seifer choked back a bubble of laughter for the way you always noticed such strange things at the worst times. He lowered his arm from his face. His identity was no secret.

"You"re under arrest."

"Piss off, fucker," Seifer said.

"I should kill you now."

Seifer watched the dark shadows of figures starting to coagulate around the edge of the circle of light. "Look. If you"re going to fight, fight. If you"re going to talk, then talk. Don"t talk and fight."

Any minute, he thought, and then someone else was going to break.

It wasn't going to be him.

Isak stood on the edge of a clearing. There seemed to be a fight going on. He was just trying to identify the fighters and work out whether it'd be a good idea to join in or just melt back into the shadows and pretend he hadn't seen anything when something sharp and metal pricked against his throat.

A cool feminine voice hissed in his ear. "Don't move. I'm not going to hurt you. Do you know what's going on here? It"s all right, you dont have to talk. Nod once for yes, shake your head for no, and if you try anything I"ll have your head. Understand?"

He swallowed, shook his head, and came within a hair's breadth of cutting his own throat. There were two men in the clearing, and more around the edges. He couldn't make out any of their features in the dark, but from the whispered snatches of conversation all around him he could guess who one of them was.

The voice cut behind him like a razor edged whip "Really, Seifer. I leave you alone for two minutes and you"re hosing the decks down with testosterone."

"Piss off, bitch," somebody said. "We"ll come for you next." Some distance away there was a flicker in the darkness. It was followed by more panicked screams and a flash of futile magic before the noises were abruptly silenced.

The woman's voice was cool and clear, each syllable a diamond-edged sliver of ice. "Listen to me," she said. "There's not much time! If we don"t fight together we're all going to die! I"m not sure what these things are. They they don't even feel whatever we throw at them! Not bullets. Not magic, not anything. People are dying here. Look, I"m sure he"ll come with you later. Just wait until these things are dead.

"You killed them!" somebody accused from the circle of the light.

"We didn"t kill anyone. One of your guys might have a hell of a headache when he wakes up in the morning but that"s about it."

"What"re you talking about? Don"t move! You"re both under arrest!"

From the darkness to the left there was a growl that got louder very fast, a scream, and a gunshot. Guns cocked with a click and bullets whined through the air from a soldier too panicked or blind to realise that there were too many people around. A dark shape moved in with a noise like a jet engine and the speed of a bullet. It seemed the size of a large dog through the mist, but as it neared the little circle of figures it changed, first smaller, and then as it threw itself into the light, larger, the size of a horse or cow, but with a flash of wicked white fangs and dark mist trailing from its flanks.

The knife at Isak's throat vanished. He stumbled away and wished he'd never come.

Seifer cannoned into Quistis, who"d already begun to move, knocking them both out of the way. There was another shot. A bullet whistled over Seifer's ear. In the clearing behind them, the gentle light of the soldier's magic went out. He heard panicked screams and shouted, useless orders. A dark shape hunched over in the middle of the clearing, eating something. Something that had, until recently, been someone.

As Seifer watched the giant wolf raised its head and growled with a sharp vicious sound. Trails of dark smoke drifted from its body with a life that seemed independent of wind.

"Bullets don"t work on them!"

"Let"s get out of here!"

"Fucking leg it!"

The wind crashed down like a hurricane, howling like a whipped cat. It hurled snow from the thin covering on the ground, flicking it up in freezing white clouds of tiny ice crystals that stung Seifer"s face. It was a good night to hide in. A good time to get lost.

He could see Quistis' shape indistinctly ahead of him in the followed her. A few more figures drifted with the snow out ofthe trees, some wary, some frightened, most –and there couldn"t have been more than a dozen of them- looking about thirteen, children wrapped in dark military uniforms too light for the weather. Seifer didn't think he'd ever been that young. They all ran together.

Seifer didn"t really know where they were going, but Quistis seemed to and that was enough for the moment. He almost fell over two dead bodies sprawled in the snow, face down with strings of blood from ripped out throats freezing on the floor as everyone fought not to look. Tough shit. If they all didn"t get somewhere sheltered soon, they were all dead anyway.

What a fucking mess, thought Seifer.

He shivered from cold and exhaustion .The adrenaline that had helped all of them through the snow was wearing off. His hands and exposed face stung from the cold. One of the Galbadian cadets paused. Seifer grabbed his coat and jerked him on, cursing at his white startled face.

The wolves, whatever they were, were still hanging round, threatening and feinting from the sides.

Seifer drew the gun Quistis had given him and aimed as well as he could hope to while running through a forest. He fired off a few shots in the hope of making them back off a few paces but heard no animal squeal of pain. The dark shapes just kept right on coming, and Seifer stopped. Ther was no point in wasting ammunition. A couple more bullets and then he'd have to reload.

Idiots, he thought. If the wolves had possessed the brain power to attack together they could have wiped them all out. Instead, they'd press from one side, making the group veer off, and then in a short while another attack would come from the opposite side.

Seifer considered using the Galbadians as bait.

And then the dark shape of a building loomed up from the snow and he promptly forgot about it.

Quistis shouted "Everybody inside!" and her voice was torn away, ripped to shreds by the wind. She sent a spell shooting in the direction of the building. But it wasn't really a building, more a ruin. Her magic faded against the enormous stone walls . The fort looked big enough to fit all of them in, plus a few thousand extra guests and right at this moment they were in no position to argue.

Hyne, it was cold!

He limped through the door in a group of tired figures; some supporting others, some alone and wary, little knots of uniformed people. Quistis swung around to cover the last escapees. The Galbadians raised their heads and stared exhaustedly at the building.

Seifer watched the night behind him. He saw nothing.

Maybe, he thought, we've lost them.


	9. Chapter Nine:One Man Army

Chapter Nine

_Take these plastic people, read their lips than let it linger_

_Is there anything that makes it sound sincere?_

_Tightly hold your hand, take a deep breath, give them the finger_

_Are you worried that your thoughts are not quite clear?_

_I remember falling_

_I remember marching_

_Like a one man army_

_Through the blaze_

_I remember coughing_

_I believe in something_

_I don't want to remember falling for their lies_

Our Lady Peace-One Man Army.

The room was massive. Its slick dark stone shone coldly in the dim light. Nobody questioned how such a large fortress got to be in this lonely place. They were just glad to have the protection of strong stone walls around them.

The gate they had entered by was the only one. The soldiers spread out, moving deeper into the room. The remnants of crumbling painted plaster and old tapestries clung to the wall. Seifer touched one and it fell away in heavy sheets. He picked up a stick from the floor, wrapped the cloth around it and touched his lighter to the rags.

The fortress looked no better in the bright light. The walls were crumbling. Pools of ice water dotted the floor. Ivy wrapped the walls like a winding sheet. Trees pierced the floor.

Quistis stared up at the rafters. Bats rustled in the darkness. At least, she hoped it was bats.

The soldiers huddled in the centre of the room. Seifer kept his distance, but nobody had said anything yet. That had to be a good thing.

The small Galbadian soldier..Isaac? dug an elbow in her ribs and stepped back with a murmured word of apology. Animal eyes gleamed in the darkness. The wolves seemed reluctant to come in. As the last of

the Galbadian's magic faded, they turned and vanished.

The Galbadians turned as one to face the more immediate threat.

" fucking traitor…"

"…sorceress"

"Almasy.."

"dead….."

"This is all your fault," one of them said to Seifer."If it wasn't for you we wouldn't be in these woods in the first place."

Seifer's voice, was razor edged and defiant. "We saved your lives. You were all running scared. You'd have got cut to pieces in those woods if it wasn't for us." He sounded ready to take on the world one punch at a time.

Quistis sighed and headed towards the Galbadians. As she reached the small group one of them soun around nervously. "There's something in here with us."

"There's nothing here. Fucking crap lot of mercenaries you are. You"re scared of your own shadows."

Seifer tossed his ersatz torch into a corned of the room. It crashed into the lowest step of a flight of stairs and lay flickering gently, giving off plumes of black oily smoke smelling of mould and mist."Scared of the dark?"

One of the Galbadians stepped forwards."That's the least of _your_ problems. You're under arrest." He raised a gun. "It's a good job Martime wants you alive."

Seifer grinned.

The soldier looked down.

Seifer's knife tapped the Galbadian's crotch. "Put the gun down. Slowly. I make involuntary muscle movements whenever I get shot."

"You"re outnumbered." the Galbadian whispered.

Seifer's grin widened. "Yes, but my knife's at your balls. Put the gun down."

The Galbadian lowered the pistol.

"Kick it away."

The soldier's boots scraped on the stone as he attempted to kick the gun away without moving his body. Quistis scooped the weapon up and slid it into her belt.

The torch that smouldered unnoticed in the corner of the room began to burn with a cold blue flame. Seifer let the Galbadian go and stepped back.

The soldier couldn't resist another dig. "We'll get you."

Quistis sighed. "In case you haven't noticed we are in a life or death situation here. Seeing as I outrank all of you.."

"In Balamb…" one of the Galbadians muttered.

"Seeing as I outrank all of you, "Quistis continued,"unless anyone thinks they're more qualified?

The soldiers shrugged. Nobody said anything.

Seifer grinned. "Me?"

"Anyone who is actually more qualified and just doesn"t have an overactive ego and a mission to piss me off, Hyne help me?" Quistis said.

"You're in command," the Galbadian grudgingly agreed. He jabbed a finger at Seifer. "But he comes with us afterwards."

"No fucking way!"

"Seifer," Qustis said, "shut up! Let me put this in perspective. In about twelve hours, a Balamb Garden transport is going to come right here. And if you all want to be on it, I suggest that you behave." Her eyes raked over them. "After all, I don't know if there's room for all of you."

"How?"

She flicked a glance at Seifer. "Seifer, allow me to demonstrate."

"What?" He raised his head.

Quistis sighed. "Hyne help me." Her hand moved towards her wrist.

Seifer backed off quickly. "Oh, that. Quistis, don't you fuckinaaaaaah."

The Galbadians looked at , as one man, they turned and looked at Quistis.

A muffled "You bitch" floated up from the floor.

"Seifer's fitted with a tracking device. It's a transmitter that sends radio waves to Garden. Unfortunately our com unit got KO'd back in the woods, but they should still be able to track him to within a metre. The unit's linked to my life vital signs-I die and it explodes. So just in case any of you even considered trying to take me out and making a run with World's Most Wanted over there, forget it. All we have to do is wait until they come to pick us up. Twenty four hours should do it. And we need every man we can get."

There was a reluctant murmur of assent. Seifer peeled himself from the floor, muttering curses, and Quistis touched his shoullder. "Seifer, we need to talk."

He glared at her. "It's not like I'm going anywhere, is it?"

She walked over to a corner. He followed her and leaned up against the wall beside her.

"That lot over there. You need to watch them, cause they're not over there having group hugs."

Quistis ignored him. "May I remind you that threatening another SeeD with an offensive weapon is worth demotion to cadet status and a formal court-martial?"

Seifer shrugged. "Tough luck I'm not a SeeD. And, at the risk of sounding twelve, they did it first. We'd be safer without them around at all. We should just go."

Quistis nearly agreed. "Just how long do you think we"d last out there? You saw the monsters."

"Simple. This lot"ll be the bait."

"So we should just leave them to die?"

He shrugged."You said it."

"That'd be as good as murder. We can't-"

He interrupted. "I can if the alternative's waiting for the monsters while those pussies work out the best way to stab me in the back. I- Hyne, what the hell is that?"

She spun around. An eerie blue light spread across the room. It glistened like salt thrown into a flame. It managed to be both beautiful and completely out of place.

The nearest Galbadians noticed it too,and their attention started to slip from Seifer to the azure haze. One man backed away as someone grabbed Seifer's. "What did you do?"

Seifer shook him off. "What the fuck?"

"It was your fault. You threw the torch."

"That's no fire-" Quistis cut in.

"Something's not right," Isak interrupted. He watched the smoke surprisingly calmly.

"No shit," Seifer said sarcastically.

Quistis reached for her whip at her belt. She uncoiled Save The Queen and then checked the Galbadian pistol at her belt, flipping the safety off. Something prickled at the corners of her mind, demanding entry. It felt like a GF, but it wasn't. Quistis knew that much.

The blue fire curled into a cone.

Quistis wondered about convection currents.

Seifer raised his right hand. He had acquired a Galbadian pistol during their flight through the woods. Now he raised the gun and flicked a sidelong glance at Quistis, his finger already tightening on the trigger. She nodded and pulled her own trigger. Two bullets cut through the clouds of smoke and pinged off the wall behind it as the smoke eddied and reformed. It was followed by a dozen more from the Galbadians. Bullets struck sparks from the flagstones.

The smoke curled up into the shape of a man. The air tasted thick with magic and Quistis automatically tried to draw it. It didn't work. From the puzzled looks on the faces of the Galbadians, they had the same problem.

She reached for the magic again, but there was nothing. It slipped away as soon as she tried to grasp it. The breeze tasted of burned sugar and ozone. She tried to cast and hit the same barrier.

Nothing.

A frown creased her face.

The blue haze solidified further. There was a soldier, now, standing where the light had been. He looked familiar. Quistis realized that he'd been in the clearing when the Galbadian threatened reached over. "That's the oldier that held the gun on you."

"I noticed," Seifer said grimly. "He looks fuckin' different, though."

"More dead." Isak cut in.

"Yeah." Seifer said slowly.

The soldier's skin was pale and waxy. His uniform was torn and bloody. Viscera poked through holes in his jacket. His throat was a bloody mess, ripped open down to the white tracheal rings. As she watched, the larynx bobbed and the corpse coughed. A trickle of dark blood ran from the corner of is mouth.

"What the fuck is going on?" Seifer swore.

The soldier's eyes rolled, very slowly, back in his head, and then rolled up again.

Seifer shivered "What's your plan now, Instructor?"

She shook her head slowly.

Seifer snarled. He flicked a knife out of the sleeve of his coat, weighted it in his hand for a second and then threw it so quickly that Quistis barely saw his arm move.

The soldier snatched the knife out of the air by its blade. Dark blood trickled down its hand.

Seifer groaned. "Fuck."

Quistis muttered "You"ve got better."

"Thanks." Seifer said.

The soldier cleared his throat again and spoke. It said _"Thank you"_

The Galbadians turned as one and looked at Seifer accusingly.

He shrugged. "Nothing to do with me."

"You are magic users. All of you. You came here. You gave me power."

Something growled from the doorway.

Everybody spun around.

Five wolves slunk through the gaping arch. In the flickering blue light, they looked far less like real wolves than they had done in the feet still didn't seem to touch the ground as they moved. The dead soldier was standing with its back to the door. It never looked round as the animals came up behind it. The wolves crept around and into the shadow of the corpse, where they slowly merged with the shadow itself. After a few seconds their bodies fused with the shadow of the creature until there was nothing left but little glints of wolf eyes, and then not even that.

"You all held magic in your minds. And it has been so long…"

"Those wolves were yours?" asked a rawboned Galbadian woman. She stepped forwards, staring at the soldier's body as if she couldn't believe her eyes. "Magri? Are you in there?"

The soldier looked down at her with something approximating surprise.

She whispered "What are you?"

"You would call me monster. I was a Guardian Force, many years ago…" It paused. "You will have heard of them."

The girl reached into her coat and pulled out a gun. She pushed the barrel up underneath the monster's chin. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

The monster sniggered.

Before she could release the trigger of the gun it…reached.

There was no other wa Quistis could describe it. She felt a gathering sense of pressure in the hall and then a sharp snap.

The Galbadian woman screamed. The pistol dropped from her hand. A dark bruise appeared on her forehead. Her eyes were wide and they stared at nothing. She twitched convulsively and collapsed. A thin trail of blood trickled from her nose.

Everyone started moving at once. Some soldiers drew weapons. A few ran forwards. A few more ran backwards, away from the monster.

The soldier reached out and flicked one finger gently.

Everything stopped.

Quistis blinked.

She was held motionless by a strange force. Isak was frozen in mid-stride next to her. Seifer stood like a statue at her right hand. His teeth were gritted and a muscle twitched in his jaw.

Quistis tried to move her hand. She couldn't.

Seifer's stomach felt like a lead weight. He watched as the monster limped between the frozen bodies of the Galbadian squard, staring into each motionless face like it was searching for someone-or for something. He wasn't sure what.

"Magic," it said a few moments later. "I need magic." It peered at a pair of Galbadian cadets and swept them aside as casually as Seifer would have extinguished a match. They toppled and lay motionlessly; certainly injured, possibly dead.

Quistis's face was a frozen mask.

Seifer had an idea.

It was a stupid idea; the kind of idea that he'd tried unsuccessfully to ignore for most of his twenty years. It was, he thought, the sort of idea that was going to get him killed.

He wondered whether Quistis' GF-junctioning would be enough to catch the monster's attention. Before he'd even thought it through he said hoarsely, "Take me."

The words echoed out across the room.

The monster didn't seem to move. It whisked across the room and reappeared in from of Seifer. The soldier's left eye had been goughed out. Blood trailed down its cheeks.

Adrenaline pumped through Seifer's veins like cold fire. He shut his eyes for a moment. "I said, I'll do it."

The monster cocked its head. Seifer didn't know what he was most scared of;that the monster would reject him, or that it would find him suitable. He realized that he had no idea what he had just volunteered for.

It reached out and touched his shoulder with a thin hand that felt like a bundle of dried twigs. Seifer felt a sharp pain in his temples. He didn't remember falling, just just the sharp crack of his knees hitting the cobblestones followed by his outflung hands. Memories of the first time that Edea had insinuated herself into his head came back to him, bitter and sharp as glass shards and wormwood. He pulled himself up to his knees, kept his head down.

The monster loomed above him like a revenant, "You will do," it said, managing to sounf as if it had bestowed a great favor on Seifer. The pain inhis head intensified. He couldn't even look up to meet Quistis' eyes.

The monster traced a symbol in thin air.

Everyone else vanished.


	10. Chapter Ten:Little Things of Venom

Chapter Ten;

_Out on the scene today_

_Blasted in every way_

_Caught on the other side_

_Some things you just can"t hide_

_Feel the poison of change in me_

_All that I"ll ever be_

_Comes back crushing on into me_

_Here it comes again_

_Has it spotted you-oh no_

_Have they got you too?_

Arid-Little Things Of Venom

"_You may stand."_ said the monster.

Seifer stood up. He glanced round, at saw nobody else.

_Don't worry. They are gone._

The words travelled straight to his brain without passing through the air.

_I must rest. This takes energy. Is there anything I can do for you?_

Seifer touched his hand to his head. His skull ached. His fingers touched something smooth and round. "Get this thing off me."

It took all of Seifer's self-control to remain still as the monster moved around to his back and reached up a hand. It dragged a broken ankle as it walked. Seifer stared at the ground as it walked past, watching as bone poked out from a hole in its trouser leg with each step. Seifer leaned his head forwards as he felt rough fingers sticky with blood trace over the transmitter.

_This is a man made thing_

It wasn't a question, but Seifer answered it anyway. "Yeah. It's, uh, a transmitter. Lets them know where I am."

_And if it is taken off?_

He shrugged, wary and anxious and not too happy with the way the conversation was going. "Then they won't."

He felt a click, and a burning sensation that made his eyes water. The monster moved back round into his field of vision and tossed something at him. He caught it automatically and looked down.

The little chip of red glass gleamed in his hand.

"Thanks, you know." Seifer slipped the tracking device into a pocket of his coat, making sure he picked one that had no holes.

_Is there anything else that you require? I must rest. Do not wander. Later, you will help me._

Seifer remembered Quistis pulling away from him. "Well, yeah, there was one thing. I need to wash."

_There is a lake under the castle. The doors will lead you there. Now I must go .I must rest and regain my strength._

"What doors? Where are the others?"

_You wil find them in due time. Wait for now. I must rest._

The soldier's mouth opened. He exhaled slowly. A thin column of blue mist drifted across the floor and rolled into a ball. The Galbadian's body collapsed to the floor. The blue orb flicked to a pinprick and vanished. There was a soft pop of imploding air and a sharp smell of ozone.

Seifer waved his hand experimentally in the air when it had been, muttered "Fucking bastard" and kicked the dry dead brand of the torch across the room until it exploded in a cloud of splinters.

He went over to check the corpse of the soldier more out of habit than because he thought the man might actually be alive. He wasn't. Seifer ransacked the corpse's pockets, but found nothing. Most of the soldier's clothes seemed to have gone the way of his entrails. Those wolves must have had teeth like damn razorblades.

He sighed, got up, and investigated the room. There were a few doors recessed into the stone wall. All apart from one were locked. Seifer opened the door and saw only darkness. He retrieved the torch and lit it before stepping inside. He saw a steep flight of stairs leading down into the night. The ceiling was so low that he hade to duck slightly. It looked ancient.

What in Hyne's name is it doing out here?, he thought, then What in Hyne's name am I doing out here?

He reviewed his plan. He'd find the monster and kill it, then go home. Wherever home was.

The stairs continued downwards. The air smelled dank.

The stairs turned so sharply that he couldn't see where he was going. Faint seams of dark wet earth appeared between the stones. The floor grew slick with water. Seifer's footsteps echoed harshly on the stone.

He came out into a huge room. There was a small pool in the centre of the room. The water was black in the dim light.

Seifer kicked a stone into the pool. Nothing moved. He sat by it just in case and listened for a while, waiting for a noise or for anything which might indicate that the water wasn't safe.

There was still nothing.

Seifer cautiously crept to the edge of the pool, knife ready. He scooped up a couple of handfuls of water. It smelt good, cold and sharp and clean. He washed quickly. The water wasn't freezing but it was cold enough to make washing an unpleasant experience. Afterwards he put his old clothes back on, shivering and still soaking wet, since he hadn't anything that could be used as a towel, and rebandaged his feet in strips ripped from his dirtiest shirt.

Afterwards he spent an industrious few minutes cropping his hair short again with the knife and shaving. His pack had vanished so he settled for sharpening his knife on the whetstone in his pocket. He built a small bonfire from the scraps of hair. He knew better than to leave any vestige of himself lying around the lair of an unknown.-whatever it was.

Once he had dressed he made his way cautiously up the stairs and tried the doors again. The first door was huge and firmly locked, and looked like it hadn't been opened in aeons. There was no way, Seifer decided, that he was going to get it open short of a few sticks of dynamite and a crowbar. The second door was smaller, barely twice his height, and rotten, but it still resisted all Seifer's attempts at opening it.

Shit, he thought. At this rate Quistis was going to die of old age before he found her.

He searched the room and found a rusted metal pipe wedged between two stones. Seifer hefted it, pleased at its weight. The smaller door lasted five or six minutes before it gave up the ghost. It felt good to have something physical to waved a cautious hand inside the opening. When it didn't activate any spells or traps he walked through.

A few seconds later the room was empty, and something smiled.

Isak wondered what to do.

He had woken up alone in a cell several hours ago. The damp seeped up from the flagstones like evil fingers and made his bones ache like he was already an old man.

He sure felt older since he'd left Galbadia. He'd seen new and interesting scenery and met lots of new and unusual people, at least half of which hadn't been trying to kill him

He still had his weapons, gun and bullets on the leather belt he always wore, but he doubted they would be much use. The monster had made it abundantly clear that there was nothing he could do with them. Isak almost wished it had taken them away. It at least would have been some indication that the creature had found them a threat. It was like it didn't care because there was nothing they could possibly do to it with cold steel.

He'd checked all the flagstones diligently just in case this place had secret tunnels like any self-respecting castle, but the cell stubbornly refused to co-operate. He'd tried prodding all of them, individually and then a few at a time, tracing round the edge of the stones in the hopes of finding a secret hinge or a gap that could be cadged wide open enough to fit a knifeblade in/ Nothing worked.

So Isak just sat and listened to the silence, ears singing with the thick silence of nothing. Several times he imagined he heard footsteps but there was never anyone there. He wondered where the others were for a while and then gave up and started trying to figure how to get out again.

The voice interrupted his reverie some time later.

"You seen Quistis?"

"No," Isak said automatically. He had managed to chip away a millimetre of cement in the last thirty minutes. He glanced round and stared right into a now familiar sardonic grin "Hang on, you shouldn"t be here."

Seifer rolled his eyes. "According to you lot, I shouldn"t be anywhere, apart from six feet under."

"I warn you, I'm armed and dangerous." Isak's voice chose this moment to break, He wished he looked armed and dangerous, something that the man standing in front of him clearly had no problem with. Surely you had to practice or something?

"One out of two isn't bad." Seifer said.

Isak held the knife up in front of him, edge chipped and gritty with the remnants of wall, and then remembered his gun. "Did you come to gloat? Because I warn you I'm a tough nut to crack."

Seifer shuddered. "Hard though it is to believe, I have no interest at all in cracking your nuts."

Isak backed up towards his pack. " "You admit it! You"ve joined up with that evil thing. You"re going to take over the world and kill us all!"

"Been there. Tried that. Would have got the tee shirt but they weren't selling any. Didn't work. Do you know where the hell Quistis is or not?"

Isak's boot scraped against the strap of his pack. "I might."

"Much as I'm enjoying this talk, some of us have got demons to slay. Now where the fuck is she?" Seifer said. He looked faintly amused, but his voice had turned dangerous.

Isak spun, brought the pack up with this foot in one smooth movement, slipped his gun out of the holster and pointed it with both hands at the man in front of him. Well, it should have, but what actually happened was that his foot got stuck in the strap and he fell over slowly and ungracefully, flailing for the gun as he fell.

Armed. Dangerous.

Riight.

Brushing the loss of dignity off, Isak brought the gun up from a sitting position instead. And then his brain caught up with his mouth. Demons to slay.

"You aren't helping it?"

"Give the little man a big cigar." Seifer snapped.

"You could just be faking it."

"You"d know. Believe me"

"So get me out of here!" Isak shouted. "We can.."

Seifer leant against the bars. "No."

"Wha..?" Isak said. "No. You've got to be kidding. You can't just leave me here to rot!" He tried to grab Seifer through the bars, but the ex-knight easily evaded him. "Not unless you tell me where Quistis is."

"I don't know." Isak moved again towards his gun. He'd always prided himself on having a long fuse, but right now the wick was burning down.

"Yeah, that's right. Shoot me. You"ll really get out that way. Hyne, what do they teach you at that school? You"re supposed to wait till I fall asleep and then prise the keys from my belt with a device made from the frame of your rucksack and half a foot of steel wire you just had lying about. Apart from I'm not staying here. I'm going back upstairs. And, fuck me, you Don't have any wire. So I guess you"re staying right here until you convince me to let you go. Bullets kind of interfere with my conversation skills."

Isak sighed. "Look, I don't know where Quistis is. But you can't just keep me here. I could help."

"Just because I'm not brainwashed doesn"t mean I'm going to be nice," Seifer said. " It's nothing you hadn't planned for me. Wait, instead of being given a trial, it"ll just make you into its mindless zombie slaves. I can live with that."

"Well, so what are you going to do?"

Seifer sighed. "I have no idea. And I can't let you out. I don't have a key."

Isak could not believe his ears."What? I thought-"

"What did you think the fucking thing was going to do? Here, I've known you for all of two minutes, have a copy of my most secret plans and a skeleton key for the entire castle and do you know my secret weakness is water and damn, there seems to be a hell of a lot of buckets round here."

"You really have no idea what you"re getting into? What the hell were you going to do when you found her anyway? You need help."

"Damn, I know," Seifer said.

"There's no way you can take this thing on your own."

"I can't _not_ do it alone. I don't trust any of you bastards. Especially you. You talk too much."

"It's proof that I'm alive." Isak came closer to the bars. "Just take this before I really start regretting it." He held out his gun and a handful of spare ammunition. "They probably won"t do any good, but...just in case."

Seifer stuffed bullets into his pockets. "Don't think that this"ll stop me kicking your ass when we get out of this. " He sighted down the barrel of the gun. "Not bad. Thanks." He turned away and then back. "Got any cigarettes?"

Isak fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboros.

"Cute name." Seifer took one and then when Isak didn't immediately snatch the packet away, a handful, grinning as the smaller soldier fumed."Matches? Lost my lighter."

"Is there anything else you"d like? A kidney?"

Seifer regarded him as one might a small and furry animal that that He'd just stomped on and had, against all expectations, run up his trouser leg."Fuck, a bottle of vodka, make that two, the raspberry pavlova, ten minutes of rest and an ambulance." He glared at Isak narrowly. "And if you lot'd just stop chasing me, that'd be great…"

Isak flipped a matchbook through the door. "No chance."

"True." Seifer shuffled in his pockets, feeling obscurely guilty, and pulled out half of the cigarettes, threw them back. "Keep them. Like you"ve got anything else to do." He turned away.

Isak watched him walk away, boots scuffing on the flags."Good luck."

"We're all gonna die." Seifer said as he walked away. His voice echoed among the passages…die…die…."

Isak shivered. Despite his distrust of the ex-knight, it felt darker now he was gone. He thought Seifer was honest, if only because he couldn't be bothered to lie. What you saw was what you got. Of course, they were both pretty unpleasant, but hey.

Seifer's boots crunched on unseen objects in the shadowy half darkness as he walked along the corridor. Out of curiosity he bent and touched the ground, threads of tattered gloves catching on rough edges of the stones. Tiny bones drifted through his fingers like sand.

He hadn't seen mice or rats since they"d came. Mind you, it wasn't like he'd been looking.

He wandered down more corridors, trying to memorise his steps. No more rooms. No more cells. No more people. The tunnels-surely he'd gone below the level of the floor by now-were clean, rectangular and bare, though in places the roots of trees pushed themselves up from the floor or walls. The same light was everywhere, pale and bluish without any visible source. Creepy, though to look on the bright side, now he knew what he was going to look like dead.

Sooner or later he worked out that he wasn't going to find any one else. There was no sound of people moving and talking and he lost his wariness as nothing appeared and tried to chew his head off. There were no monsters and not even any evidence that they might have laired here in the past, no toothmarks on bones or piles of nested litter.

Dawn was hours away.

He walked on until he reached a window. It was huge, easily twice his height, heavily carved and empty of glass. The wind blew in flakes of snow, but there was nothing but blackness outside. Why wasn't the sun coming up? Why had he somehow managed to get from below ground floor to a third storey window without climbing any stairs? Why wasn't he just leaving? But the thought of going out again into the night made him shiver. There was something comforting about solid stone walls, no matter how weird and draughty they were.

He walked on. Forty minutes later, there was still no light, Seifer hadn't reached a corner or climbed any stairs, and from a quick glance out a second window, he was now on the fourth floor. The corridors were studded with gargoyles. Their eyes gleamed in the halflight like little malevolent raisins.

Seifer reached out and struck a match on one to light one of the cigarettes he'd bummed off Isak and was almost disappointed when it didn't move or try and bite him. He needed something to hit. Without much hope, he tried a simple orientation spell, but the magic didn't work. He tried it again with the same effect and then cursed, kicked one of the smaller floor level gargoyles until it crumbled into little pieces but still refused to fight him, and wandered off again.

The castle gave him the creeps.

Seifer came to another window -second floor this time-and checked the sky again. This window had once had glass in it and the jagged remains spiked upwards like dragon"s teeth from the sill.

He shouted "Is anybody alive out there?" without much hope and then regretted it when he thought exactly what things might be crawling round outside.

He leaned on the windowsill and stared out, ignoring the fierce wind. Right now, back in Marduk, He'd be reaching for another bottle, avoiding dealing by getting dead drunk. The nicotine helped a bit, but not enough.

It wasn't that he was afraid. In Garden they"d been trained to walk through the most sophisticated security like it wasn't there, locate the target and pinpoint and get out fast, but his ignorance; the gut feeling that someone was fucking with the law of physics and wondering where the hell everyone was was getting on his nerves.. The forest had been bad, but at least He'd always known which direction he was heading, following the sun by day and the stars by night.

Seifer dragged a hand down his face and saw dark eyes ringed with shadow reflected in the broken glass of the window. The paler bits where he'd managed to shave and wash the best part of a month"s worth of grime off contrasted oddly with the tanned skin of his cheekbones.

Hyne, he looked like a fucking refugee or something.

Hardly a hero.

Ironic, that he'd looked so much more of a hero back in the old days, when he'd been doing everything wrong. No one in their right mind would have cast Squall as the saviour then, with that pimp coat and jewellery, for Hyne"s sake, and his habit of sitting in corners all the time and answering every question -or taunt- with "Whatever" and a kind of amused detachment that just made Seifer fighting mad.

And now he was back in Balamb, doing pretty well for himself He'd heard, with the job and the glory and the girl

Damn it. He'd liked Rinoa.

When he'd met her in Timber he'd thought they were all a lot of idealistic idiots, and hadn't bothered to hide it. So they"d fought, or at least as much as you could with Rinoa and her puppy dog eyes and her little way of asking why, in her cute little voice, and the long and the short of it was that He'd travelled back to Garden alone in September.

And then she'd got in touch with him again, asked him to do her a favour.

And he'd said yes.

Seifer mentally shook himself.

He'd been doing too much thinking lately. A mistake. If you kept opening up old scars it only hurt the more.

A finger absently traced the line of the old one across his face. He rubbed his hands across it, feeling the slight ridge of the skin. His vision blurred and he wondered if it would hurt just to sit down. The floor was dusty and covered in dead leaves, but he'd slept in worse places and he was so tired right now that the bare boards looked better than a five-star hotel.

Seifer stamped on the floorboards harder and though they creaked they held. He walked across the middle of the corridor, boots squealing an unholy cacophony of groans, slid down with his back to the wall and wrapped himself in his coat. If he couldn't do anything, he might as well sleep.

He closed his eyes.

Not so far away, Quistis woke up.

Her head was pillowed on something hard, which after a few seconds of panic she realised was her arm.

She blinked, adjusted her glasses sleepily and sat up fast as consciousness came flooding back, carrying unpleasant flotsam with it.

It all came back to her, floating down the river of her mind like a drowned rat. The snow. There had been that thing. They hadn't been able to move, shouting, and then it had all gone dark.

And Seifer.

How could she forget?

She looked around.

She was in a cell. Or an empty room with a locked door, anyway, which was the same thing. The room was bare, no doors, no windows, a perfect little square room that appeared to have been hewn out of the rock. The walls were smooth and featureless and slick with water.

The water dripped on the floor and pooled among the prone bodies of three people, all wearing torn Galbadian uniforms.

Quistis rose. She winced and adjusted her spectacles.

She checked each soldier's pulse and breathing. Everything appeared normal. She recognised the third person, lying against the back wall, as someone she'd vaguely noticed in the crowd. She was slightly older than Quistis; tall with acne-scarred cheeks and heavy black hair hacked off at jaw length.

Quistis shook her and then the two men. They did not wake.

What in Hyne's name was going on?

She shrugged off her pack and did a cursory check, rooting through equipment and tossing most of out onto the floor. Seifer had the tent, but there was enough food for three days and a couple of can of self-heating coffee. Matches. Her sleeping bag. Hyne, the thing had even left her weapons. She lifted out a can of coffee and activated it, juggling it from hand to hand as it heated up. The smell of coffee filled the cell, reminding her of early mornings and late nights and study periods.

She sat there for a while, clearing her thoughts with the can of coffee cradled in her hands. After a bit she saw a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. The Galbadian woman was coming round. As Quistis watched, she groaned, propped herself up on one elbow and rolled to hands and knees. She spoke in a voice like gravel. "Shit."

Quistis dangled the remnants of the coffee under her nose and the woman grabbed it like a lifesaver.

"Sweet holy Hyne, what was that?"

"I don't know." Quistis was surprised by how calm and analytical her voice soundedThe woman drew herself up to a sitting position and swept the cell with her eyes. She saw the men and looked concerned.

"Don't worry. I've checked them and they're all right. You know them?"

" Sure. Stren. Dom. And I'mRahel." She managed a sharp smile. "Pleased to meet you. Damn. I just wish the circumstances had been different." She set the coffee down. " Thanks. I guess we're stuck here for now. So. Like to fill me in?"

"Who was the girl? The one it killed?" Quistis asked

"Eshe. Good soldier." Rahel"s hands played idly with the plastic trim on her jacket, not looking at Quistis.

"Were they ..lovers.? Her and that other guy?"

The other woman made eye contact for the first time. "Nope. She didn't even like him." She laughed, tipping her head back. "Funny, that. But I recognise your face. You"re Quistis Trepe. The war heroine." It wasn't a question."So, whaddya think?"

"About what?"

Rahel rolled her eyes. "This. This whole situation. The fact that we"ve got no backup, since all the coms are out, no magic, no chance of escaping, and no hope. Plus that our homicidal ex-prisoner seems to have gone to the Dark Side, which let"s face it, isn"t really a surprise"

Quistis pushed up her glasses, a characteristic gesture those who knew her well would have recognised from whenever she was worried. "You, know, I'm not sure he has."

"Please." In a kind of sarcastic, "pull the other one, It's got bells on" tone."Just like he did with the Sorceress." The older woman"s face was a thin flat line." "After what they did to Trabia, nothing that man could do would surprise me. Including joining up with whatever kind of force trapped us here."

"He's no angel…"

"Damn right."

"But you forgave Edea. Why can"t you do the same here? Let us have him. He's Balamb's problem."

"That woman was a teacher before she went bad. And she completely changed character. She was possessed." Rahel said.

"Then why can"t you accept that he was being controlled too?

"Well, let me think. He was never a model of good behaviour before it happened, he didn't change his manner much, and oh, yeah, since the wars he's been involved in a number of activities that are shady to say the least. I didn't notice Edea hiring out as an assassin. Fleeing into the wilderness is not the act of an innocent man."

Quistis sighed. Damn Balamb for sending her on this mission. Damn Seifer for making her have to defend him. And damn the monster for putting her in this situation. "He belongs in Balamb." She raised her chin, adjusting her glasses in a way that any of her students would have recognised as meaning that the gloves were off.

If he's so damn innocent it'll come out in the trial," Rahel muttered.

"Really? Because who are you going to get to judge him without bias? A military Galbadian trial? A jury of civilians? You?"

The two women glared at each other. The angry silence was only broken by a groan from the corner. One of the male soldiers was getting up, moaning. As he rose he kicked the second, who also began to stir. Quistis couldn't work out which one, they both looked kind of the same, except one had brown hair, and one was blond.

The blond one got up first. "Rahel."

She nodded. "Stren. Hope you"re okay."

He blinked. "Think so."

"Scared?"

"Nah. I'm only scared of two things. Spiders. And women." He grinned and turned to Quistis. "And spider women. Talking of which, you are…?"

"Quistis," Quistis said.

Rahel pointed at the dark haired soldier. "Bron. And Stren."

Stren looked her up and down, obviously.

"We were just talking about the ..situation." Rahel added, emphasising the last word.

"Door locked?" he asked.

"Obviously."

"We"re just sitting in here for no reason at all." Quistis snapped. This whole situation was making her nervy. "I'mworried about Almasy. He scares me because I know what he's capable of when pushed and he's going to do something stupid if we can"t help him."

"And if we do help him he's still going to do something stupid but that way we"ll be mixed up in it too?" Rahel pointed out.

Quistis sighed."Good point. But he claims it doesn"t worry him and then spends every waking minute trying to prove he's someone to be reckoned with. It doesn't stop him being an arrogant, self-serving bastard but it probably explains the reasons behind it."

"Can't you get him back?" asked Rahel."You said you have a transmitter. Linked to your vital signs."

"Well, yes, but I don't think it's doing anything at all." She hoped that it wasn't.

""Well, at least we have a way to kill him. It's just something you should think about." The older woman leaned back against the wall, deceptively relaxed, hands dangling over crossed knees. She spoke with her eyes closed. "I don't see why you"re so bothered anyway. He's a murderer."

Quistis' eyes narrowed, behind her glasses. "Whatever he is, he's Balamb's."

"And you did such a great job of dealing with it before? You and your sorceresses.."

"What exactly are you suggesting?" said Quistis.

This time it was Stren's turn to pour oil on troubled water."Look, no-one's suggesting anything."

"But under Galbadian law a person who is a member of a terrorist group or a threat to national security can be imprisoned indefinetly on the basis of evidence inadmissible in a trial and on a significantly lower level of proof. The Crime and Security Act, paragraph five, subsection A," Rahel said. "It's the law. And I'd say that attempting a military coup was pretty much a threat to national security. You know what we"re saying's right, you just don't want to admit it."

And the thing was, she was right. Quistis had stuck to the rules all her life and the last thing she wanted to do was _defend _Seifer Almasy. She imagined the trial would go something like this. "You almost destroyed the world and killed a lot of people. Now lock him up and throw away the key." No crown court in the world would release him.

They"d be mad to.

But somehow, she couldn't help thinking that the ragged, haunted man sHe'd travelled with in the last few days was different from the arrogant SeeD cadet she'd taught. Maybe more dangerous, as he seemed to have most of the sense of honour he'd always had scoured away by the last year, and sometimes she'd got the feeling that that was the only thing that kept that lot going, after all, the posse always stuck to the rules, even if the fact that the rules were theirs in the first place did make that kind of irrelevant

But there was justice, and then there was doing what was right. And right now, Seifer was doing what was right, much as she hated to admit it to herself, and, of course, he was just doing it to get his ass out of trouble and didn't care much about anyone else, but maybe he really was going to save them. Personally she didn't think that this cancelled out trying to end the world, but right now, it had to be a good thing.

And what would she do? Meekly hand him over to the Galbadians? Take him back to Garden anyway? Let him go?

Something watched.

It didn't have a name, being either too old or too new, but it knew when an opening was presented and it took it when it was offered.

It could see the man, sitting leaning against the wall wrapped in his coat in the middle of the hallway, and it waited.

This one was…different. It could feel the marks of power, like snail tracks in the early morning over leaves. .

It watched until it was sure that the man was asleep, his breathing slow and regular and then it pounced.

It was always easier to follow a trail that had already been laid down. It delved deeper, sorting through memories and half-formed dreams and picking images, choosing some, discarding others.

Thousands of years ago it had come into existence, back when the world was young and the smell of snow blew through these dark forests. The woods had been populated only by small bands of wanderers who had first settled here, found shelter for a while, lived, died, and buried their dead, recognising the power in this place and giving it a name. The belief had run like a sharp clear mountain stream and every death had made it stronger. But then the climate had changed, and people had moved on, south to warmer climes and left this harsh unforgiving land behind. Oh, there had been little pockets of belief, but tiny sparks compared to the raging fire it had once gloried in. Over the years, it had learned to take what it needed, to stay alive. And over the years it had not survived by making mistakes.

It intended to live. There could be no error.

It focused in harder, turning over forgotten thoughts and old scars like a child on a beach sorting through stones. Despite its nature, which was fey, and therefore mistrustful, it kept getting a sense that something was not right. Something, therefore, that should be examined.

Aahh. It delved deeper, and suddenly it knew. Knew about him. The blisters on his feet and the tattoo spreading across his shoulders and the deep scar on the sole of his right foot that always hurt when it got wet, old old callouses left from gunblade training, the memory of a white coat and a red cross and a little blondhaired girl, and a woman with dark hair and amber eyes like bottle glass. A beach long ago, and the wind coming in from the sea like it was blowing up a storm.


	11. Chapter Eleven

Okaaay…here we go again.  Normal disclaimers apply

Chapter Eleven

 Never made it as a wise man  
I couldn't cut it as a poor man stealing  
And this is how you remind me  
 Of what I really am  
 It's not like you to say sorry  
I was waiting on a different story  
This time I'm mistaken  
For handing you a heart worth breaking and 

I've been wrong, I've been down,  
To the bottom of every bottle  
These five words in my head  
Scream "Are we having fun yet?"

Nickelback: How You Remind Me (edit.)

And Seifer woke.

There was nothing but blue above his head. Squinting into the bright sun, he looked around. A beach.  No shit. 

He was lying on his back, arms spread out to the sides. If this was another hallucination, it was fucking real. 

Seifer stood up, a lengthy process that looked like it really should involve some kind of heavy lifting equipment. He swayed.

 Shit, he felt sick. The noises of seagulls and waves and his own heartbeat melted and weave together in a crazy tapestry of light and heat and the feel of sand on his bare feet. 

His grey trenchcoat was familiar on his body, sand catching in the bottom of his trousers, necklace warm against his throat. But no gloves, and his hands felt naked without them. No weapons. And that felt even stranger, for such a long time he'd lived and slept and eaten with a dagger or gun always near his hand, wary and watching..

Running a hand though his soft buzzcut, Seifer looked round but there was nothing, just clear aqua water, laced with white foam and deepening out to sea, dunes behind him fading towards a golden horizon. And a set of footprints etched into the sand as if someone had come, stood by him, and then continued on.

A tiny dark figure was outlined against the rays of light further down the beach.

He started walking, feet pushing against the soft sand. The sun seemed like it should be setting soon, with the shadows long and the amber golden light washing lazily over everything it touched, but in the time it took for him to walk a good hundred metres down the beach there was no change and he left no footprints behind.

As he got closer the silhouette started to look like Quistis, and he speeded up, walking easily now on the hardpacked wet sand left by retreating waves. Bare feet traced through seaweed and kelp and tiny shells. Further on it resembled Squall….Selphie, IrvineZell…..too fast for his eyes to see and as he finally caught up and placed a hand on its shoulder to pivot it round, it was Edea.

She laughed and as he hesitated for a moment, drawing back, it flickered, changed to the empty shattered face of the dead soldier and then to an abstract cloud of blue mist, almost invisible against the sea, little glinting slits that might or might not have been wolf-eyes shining at the base of the column. Or maybe they were just bits of sand, which swirled up and coalesced like clotting black blood into the Edea shape again. 

The gunblade came easily to his hand, an arc of deadly dark steel swinging up to point at the apparition's throat.

It laughed, raising a black-gloved sharpedged hand to catch the edge of the sword which made him flinch and push the sword in a jab that should have poked a neat hole in its throat and the arm sheltering it both, but left no mark.  

_"Bad move."_

Great . Seifer drew back a couple of steps and tried to think about what to do next.  He'd already come to the conclusion that this was probably some kind of dream, what with the changing of shapes and the way, well, everything was too perfect, the whole landscape pristine, sterile and glossy like the enclosure of some exotic animal at the zoo.

"Get the fuck out of there.  We both know it's not her.  You're not fooling _anyone_."

_Maybe not.__ You decieve yourself if I think I am trying to fool you.  We both also know that your intentions were not entirely honest._  It spoke like it was rebuking a servant

"You can read minds." Flatly. Seifer shifted uncomfortably, noticing that the imaginary sun shed no heat, on a real beach he'd have been sweating rivers by now, wearing his coat.

_No, but I can read yours now. You're thinking' how does it know what I'm thinking?'   _

_As a sign of my good will I will refrain for the moment.  And repeat my offer. _

"I already tricked you once. Why the hell would you do this again?" He thought, while he said it, unless it wanted him to agree. 

Needed him to agree.

  Because it was weak. 

Because in a million years it was never going to get anyone else to say yes apart for some deadbeat loser who had nothing left to live for. Weaknesses could always be exploited. Maybe he could find a way to kill it, keep it on edge.  Maybe he was so far out of his depth he couldn't even see the bottom.  Maybe the sharks were just beginning to circle, out of sight.

He stuck a verbal knife in and twisted, testing the water. "You said you're weak. If you could do that you would have by now. You're just not damn strong enough, are you? Fucking useless. Otherwise you wouldn't be here, hiding in this crappy bargain-basement Gothic Vincent Price shithole. You'd be out there doing some bad. And I don't see you doing anything much apart from hanging round.  I don't think you've got any power. I'm not helping something that won't help me. Go fuck yourself. I'm calling your bluff."

The apparition flickered once more between the shape it had adopted and the column of blue fog, almost too fast to see.  It resembled some kind of bizarre editing trick on a too-cool-to be-true music video, an unholy combination of woman, liquid nitrogen and Haze blue air freshener.  It seemed to think for a moment (though how the hell Seifer could tell what a pile of blue smoke was thinking he had no idea)and then spoke in a voice like the slamming of wrought iron gates, It was cold and final and very very old and it made Seifer's skin prickle like a bitch.

_Very well._

He just had time to think shit, now _that was a mistake, and the beach spun with a lunatic funfair slant colours merging sand to swirling blue and misty green and back to greyblurredbluedarkredlikelipstickandgrapesandgrey ..clouds. Clouds. And a grey desert. Wasteland. Time compression?_

Great. Déjà vu.

His subconscious must really hate him.

The nothing-landscape spun once more with a sick lurch and then settled. A breeze brushed his shoulder, a voice at his back.

_Always leaping into things you don't understand…_

He spun, gunblade cutting through the air.

_Behind you_

Nothing but greyness and wind.

_Behind you.___

He whirled, free hand balling into a fist, eyes scanning the featureless blurs for something to focus on.

_You are slow.  And predictable._

"You don't know me."

A movement in the mist and Edea was standing again in the fog, all dangerous smile and little black dress, eyes burning amber.

"Don't fucking _do that."_

The Edea-thing came closer. It gave a innocent radiant grin that the possessed Edea never could have attempted, but he had a nasty feeling that the innocence was only a veil over something darker and far deeper, older.

_Why? I know everything about you. I can see your memories. When you were five years old you father threw you through a window and broke three of your fingers and two of your ribs. When you lived at Garden you used to keep your copies of Playboy under the mattress and your little roommate found them and ripped them up and said RAGE and threw them out of the window.  And of course your career as the sorceresses knight.  How…..romantic. Faithful. Stupid. It made it so easy .because the pathways were already open. Not everything can be solved by fighting._

"Fight this, fucker." He slashed at the air, ineffectually, Damn. He closed his eyes, opened them. Still there. The landscape of nothing shimmered unpleasantly.

_You turned me down once. Have you heard the saying 'do it the hard way, or the easy way?'. This is the hard way  .Pity  .It would have been so much easier if you'd done this of your own free will.  It takes so much power to go against someone's will .But I can feel it in your head…...the dreams , the magic….live in dreams for far too long, and you go mad, you can't wake up properly and you never really get the hang of reality again.  Isn't that what you're afraid of?  But this time, they'll never end. You think everything seems so drab since you came back. A  knight without a cause to fight for. I can let you live again. You remember how you felt so alive then? I can give it back. _

"I'd rather die."

_Sorry._  It spun, face changing into a disingenuous childish smile_. Choice is no longer an option.._

The wraith flickered again and changed into Quistis, hand on her hip and with a coquettish smile she never would have in real life. A pale hand ran up one thigh, to her breasts, presenting herself to him like she was demonstrating an expensive new product. It was just playing with him now and he resented that, something here again he couldn't fight with steel. 

"I'm not being a fucking tool again. Get as much blood on your instruments as you want but don't leave me to take the blame when someone hammers a stake through your heart." 

The wraith turned its head. _You care for her. Way to change the subject.  _

"I don't care about anyone. " A lie.  "Except myself." 

_You like to pretend that, don't you? _

"I'll kill you." And at that moment he meant every word.

_I am… hard to kill._

"Well, I guessed that. But a sword through your throat might prove you wrong. Want to try?"

_How sweet. You've already lost, and you don't even know it. You can't, anyway. Not with that..thing, that piece of metal. Not now, not here. Even less than the memory of a sword. How quaint. But you always did want to be a hero.'_

"You don't know anything about me, you fucking piece of shit." His hands shifted restlessly on the hilt of Hyperion. 

_I know one thing, Seifer Almasy._

He snarled  "What?", feet shifting in the nothingness, as he moved automatically into a defensive crouch, poised, weight balanced evenly on the balls of his feet.

_You've lost._

It backhanded him across the face, almost faster than he could see. He'd already brought the gunblade up into a guard position that should have chopped its hand off like a stick of butter, but the sharp edge cut through the arm of the thing like a stone through water and the flesh split and resealed behind it. The feel of it against his skin, a grey slick touch of it in his head. Another second of that and he would have gone completely and gratefully insane.

The spirit shifted, at once a room of twenty or thirty people, and just one, some male, female, young, old. The face changed and morphed too, from a soldier's mouth open in a silent scream and with a scar neatly bisecting the remains of his left eye, a young child with her hair braided in beads and rags, a old woman hunched and wispy and thin another man this time middle aged and with a beard the colour of salt and pepper a girl with long brown hair and green eyes. 

 Seifer touched his face, burning, skin on fire and a substance like mercury seemed to cling to his fingers like acid before he shook it away, the pain like nothing he'd ever felt before, like blood and death and defeat. Like someone had heated a knife and pressed it to his cheekbone, slicing through skin and flesh and bone and muscle until nothing was left and then cutting down into his soul as well, cutting through all his little petty hopes and desires and despairs like a cheesewire though soft wax.

And so maybe it'd kill him after all, he thought with the perfect logic and clarity that only came at such times, after you've seen the person in the shadows you didn't know was there, heard the click of a gun cocking and just knew you weren't going to be able to move away in time.

 It raised an arm and touched a hand lightly against his forehead and the world fell away. 

Seifer fell with it. It was hard to stand when the ground had just been ripped out from under your feet, no matter how imaginary. 

He was falling. He was going to die. Again.  Dammit.

Seifer fell in silence. To proud to scream, too heavy to float.

There was no sound, and nothing to see except the greyness blurring past. His coat flapped behind him as twisted in the air, falling head down and trying not to look at whatever lay below him until he did anyway and it was just more fucking grey so he didn't bother again..

Onlyadreamonlyadreamonlyadream. Think it could freak him out?

He had to admit, it was succeeding. If he hit rockbottom he was going to wind up looking like an imploded plum…. Stay calm. He could do this. The one thing he knew how to do. He'd fallen before. The fallen knight. It hurt…..it got easier with practice. 

A voice in his ear. He craned his head round, but the sound was coming from a point just behind him, and he couldn't see anything, no matter how fast he turned his head.

_You can make no mistakes and still lose. It isn't weakness, it's just life. It doesn't have to be this hard._

Seifer lashed out because who knew, maybe it was the kind of monster you just had to hit in the right place to kill, despite the whole limitless magic thing. His hand cut through empty air. Maybe not, then.  But when in doubt, hit something. Makes you feel better.  Stupid, Talk about an invitation to rip open psychological scars.

It was a philosophy that had served him well, or not so well, depending on your viewpoint.

 "Over.  My.  Dead.  Body." Hard to talk, the wind ripping the words out of his mouth and carrying them away.  Casual defiance, in an 'I can do witty dialogue in a situation of almost certain death' way._._

_You're no use to me dead._

He looked round, despite himself, opening his mouth to tell the ..thing it was talking bullshit to find the coat flapping behind him and ripped into bloodstained tatters and something on his back that could be either sweat or blood. The half-formed words turned into a muffled obscenity as he tried not to scream, gone beyond begging or anything else until the pain passed, wind whipping the words away from his face as he exhaled in a long string of cursewords of every damn thing he could think of. Blood from wrist to fingertips in long sticky threads, ground under nails chewed and stained with nicotine and paler from months of winter gloves. 

The wind carried the drops away like red flowers in the wind.

"What the fuck?" Why was it doing it? Why now? Why him?

He just wanted to be left alone.

 Fucking trouble magnet for any freaky-ass wack job thought it wanted to take over the damn world. 

_I can't hurt you, you know. It's all in your head._

It felt damn real. "Aaa.._fucking__ Hyne..Will you stop screwing up my mind, you freaky bastard?"  The pain stopped again. Heaving, dragging in breaths , dry retching on an empty stomach, only the harsh metal taste of coppery blood  and bile in his mouth and a feeling in his belly pulling him down like lead, as surely as a millstone, what the hell, he was finished, dead, whatever this thing wanted._

And the next time he looked round his hands were clean, normal, with only callouses and old scars marking them, souvenirs he couldn't lose from a holiday that never really was that great to begin with. When he woke up, if he woke up, they'd look just like that, he bet. No marks. Well, none that weren't there already.

Bet they'd be shaking a bit, though.

_Do you want to be like this?_

Visions slipped across his mind, mostly of him.  Alone, in a stale room stinking of beer and cigarettes, pulling an old belt around his arm with his teeth and slipping a stained hypo full or a clear liquid into arms that bore the needle tracks overmarking old scars, old, bitter, drunk, dead, in a wheelchair, in a coffin, back at Garden and spending all his life hiding from something he'd been and done forever, pitied by some and hated by others and in a cell with crosses marking days on the wall and the whole place half-covered with pencil marks and the rest by a poster hanging sideways some chick in a fur bikini people queuing to point and stare and feel all damn smug that they'd made the right choices, been with the winning side.  Bastards.   

If it was going to pull the old 'hypothetical futures' balls, why couldn't there be some happy ones? Maybe people who tried to destroy the world didn't get happy futures.

" 'm not like that." But then it'd be nice to have one, right now. "Thought I was..taller."

Something yanked at his head, forcing him to look at the ground. And the first thing he thought was 'hey, there is ground' followed by 'oh, shit.' 

No-one to pull him out or catch or hold on to. He hadn't expected it.

Or maybe he had.

Everything stopped.

Oh yeah, go check out   

for a great ff8 MST featuring Robot!Squall, Whiny!Rinoa and Stoned!Selphie. . But for God's sake don't go on it unless you have at least two hours of time to spare. Need to work. Must work..dammit.

Okay.  This chapter's a bit shorter than I usually write 'em, but then the chapters before it were longer than I wanted, so it must kind of balance out. I also like beach imagery, but judging from the Kingdom Hearts amvs, so do Square.

 The beach stuff was heavily inspired by an old clip from a black and white film about WW2 pilots that was a backdrop at a Flaming Lips gig, in case anyone cares. And all the alternative reality things were fic descriptions on the first three pages of ff.net, pt from the poster thing, which is of course Shawshank Redemption. Poor guy.

Also, my wonderful sister made me a GB CD to cheer me up what with examinage and all. This is the song list, in case anyone is interested, some are chapter songs, some will be, and the rest..just fit, I guess. GB-best read with these songs in the player, a pint in your right hand and the best part of a packet of fags in your left….the author in no way condones smoking and cannot be held responsible in any way for lung cancer caused by reading this work of fiction….

Intro:

Sympathy-GooGoo Dolls, Michigan Militia-Moxy Fruvous

Main:

Hello City-Barenaked Ladies, The Trouble Song-John Gorka,  Forty Miles from the Sun-Bush, Sullivan Street-Counting Crows, Crash-Dave Matthews Band,  Monsters-The Bush The Tree and Me ( my sister's mate's sister's band-they're very good, go make them rich and famous) Over at the Frankenstein Place-Rocky Horror Show soundtrack, Scar Tissue-Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Space Between-Dave Mathews Band, Fool-Mansun, Name- GooGoo Dolls

Epilogue

Do you Sleep-Lisa Loeb, Stress-Jim's Big Ego. 

Also, thanks to breaker-one (Hope that doesn't mean he's OOC…got tired of "must save random orphans..drowning baptists..baby seals" Seifer. He was never particularly nice in the game. Also, I think it's a combo of the English author trying to find alternative ways to say 'fuck', the coat, the smoking, the sarcasm and the blondness. Aaaah….I give up.  Seifer IS Spike.) Dalpal (ta) ElfGurl (also thanks a lot), Kams Blue Tiger (thanks, but what the hell does rnrn MEAN, guys?) Quistis88 (d00d, you make me happy.) VegaKeep (well, the predictability of isn't that high..what you think's going to happen probably is what's going to happen. ,I'm afraid) and yaya-meets-nana (cool name)  
  



	12. Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve:

  
Oh, I woke up in hell today  
I woke up depressed and drained   
But that's okay 'cause   
I promised not to hurt you again   
Apparently I'm to blame  
But apparently I've been framed   
My memory that won't help me   
When it's happening   
Out of mind out of soul out of light out of control…...

Oh, I promised you I would change   
I'm an asshole, and I'm ashamed   
And I'm upset 'cause I betrayed   
Everything that you gave   
Will you ever let me explain?   
Can I beg you to let me stay?  
Don't quit me 'cause   
I'll never let this happen. 

Our Lady Peace-Middle Of Yesterday

And Seifer woke up.

He rubbed his scar, absently.

He vaguely remembered having had a dream. He sorted though memories, trying to remember what it had been about, but the remnants slipped through his fingers like water.

It had been..important.

All he remembered was a beach. There had been someone else. They'd fought.

He'd won. Of course he'd won. He always won.

Seifer smiled. 

It felt good for a change. At last he knew what he was going to do.

Behind his eyes mist swirled and rolled among old dark trees as something deep inside him beat its hands convulsively against the onslaught of memories and darkness and fire, swearing and shouting. 

He knew things. Knowledge was power, and power sang through his veins like fire, like electricity and heat and alcohol and ice all at once, jammed into some unholy cocktail with the kick of a mule and the energy of a dynamo. 

He set off down the corridor. A casual observer would have noticed that he seemed to carry himself in a different way, and that his walk had changed from abstracted angry wandering to purposeful and direct.

"Hey."

Quistis glanced up from her protocol manual, rubbed her eyes, knocking her spectacles off, slightly, and gazed up through the smeared lenses at Seifer, outside the cell.

He looked slightly different in a way she couldn't put her finger on, leaning against the wall and wreathed in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. He seemed to have washed, so maybe that was it. At least the permanent five-o-clock shadow had gone, his hair was cropped very close to his head, almost shaved, and there was a number of small cuts on his face that indicated he'd done both with a knife. His eyes looked very dark, either tired or worried. She couldn't decide.

He stepped closer to the bars, boots scraping on the flags. "You okay?"

Duh. "About as good as I'm going to get." Quistis gestured for him to be quiet. "You shouldn't wake them up. "

Pointing to the three Galbadian soldiers curled on the concrete around her, she rose and moved closer to the bars, treading carefully and nearly silently around them. "You're not exactly flavour of the month."

"Am I ever?" Seifer grinned wryly around the cigarette, inhaled and let the smoke out in a soft breath. Up close he smelled of cigarettes and gunpowder and leather and less of unwashed feet.

"You washed."

He stubbed the cigarette out on one of the bars, flicked the butt away and rubbed the back of his neck absently with the other hand. "Yeah."

"Did you see the thing? Is everything all right?"

Seifer stepped closer, gesturing her to move in. He leant his head slightly to one side, taking in the good five-inch difference between their heights, and spoke softly, almost in her ear. 

"Yeah. It's all okay."

His spoke into her hair and she leaned forwards into him, with the bar pressing into breast and belly between them. It wasn't a gesture she would normally have made, but hell, it was late, and she was tired, and he was warm and safe, or at least safer. He slid a large hand round the back of her neck.

"We're going to get out of here, I promise." 

She felt the words rumble in his throat as he slid the other hand round the back of her neck, forehead almost touching hers.

She glanced up, almost shyly, into brown eyes. 

This wasn't like him. But right now, she really didn't care. It was late, or rather early. She was tired.

Weren't his eyes green? And then the thought, as well as all others, scattered out of her head as Seifer kissed her. Hard. It wasn't a reassuring kiss, or a sisterly one, or even a nice one. His hands knotted hard behind her neck, pulling her into him and she tried to push him away, because this really wasn't the time. 

He leant back against the wall, releasing her, and then smiled

"I've been waiting to do that for five years. Or rather, he had." He smiled, a grin that seemed much more sinister than Seifer's normally cynical or nasty smirk and not in the least bit reassuring. His teeth seemed more prominent in the half-light, more pointed.

"Seifer?" Quistis may have occasionally wondered abut Seifer's sanity in the last couple of years, but she'd never imagined that he'd go so low as to speak of himself in the third person. She scrubbed at her lips with a corner of her uniform, tasted blood.

"Live for the moment, Instructor. I'm tired of living every minute like I'm under a death sentence."

"Seifer, you ARE under a death sentence. And I'm beginning to think that might be a good thing." She stared at him hard. He looked different, apart from the lack of dirt. His body language was foreign in a subtle way, and although he was still smoking, she didn't think he'd used any swearwords in the last ten minutes. This was unusual for Seifer, whose sentences were usually punctuated with swearing in the same way bars of chocolate were punctuated with nuts.

Quistis squinted at his eyes. As far as she could see between the shadows they still looked abnormally dark, which okay, could have been just lack of sleep, but there was something … guarded ...about his manner. 

Compared to Squall, Seifer was an open book, if one with very short sentences, swapping between one of three moods, smirking, scowling and slightly manic. And she'd usually been able to tell what he was thinking. Right now, she couldn't. It was like he'd suddenly acquired three extra layers of personality. Something clicked.

"Oh, Hyne."

"Penny dropped, Instructor?"

He could say that again. It felt like a whole truckload of the damn things had just landed of her head. She mentally kicked herself for not noticing anything sooner. When the fuck was her gun? The whip would never reach that far. Yeah, like she hadn't though she'd need it, just in a haunted castle. Quistis turned her head and caught a glint of metal tucked in the side pocket of her bag. 

"Be my guest." Shadowed and leaning against the wall, he gave a kind of indulgent smirk that made her fists itch. 

Quistis crossed the room in two long angry stalking strides and caught the gun up, checking it was loaded without looking, her hands flicking though the well-practiced movements in a kind of unconscious semaphore as she kept both of her eyes and all of her attention on the man in front of her.

Now. She could go for the direct approach or a more diplomatic route, testing the water gradually instead of plunging straight in. 

The delicate little dances of politics, the cut and thrust of words instead of weapons as people avoided saying out loud what everyone knew only too well and discussed behind closed doors, were essential for any SeeD with ambition to understand and like almost everything else in her short career Quistis had learned them well. However, if she was dealing with the real Seifer, he wouldn't understand dancing round the point anyway, and if what she was suspecting was true, it was pissing her off way too much for her to bother with any of that kind of diplomacy. Fuck it.

She swallowed and spoke softly. "You're not Seifer."

"True. Now aren't you going to say something like "You'll never get away with this?""

Quistis drew back from the bars to stand as far away as she could get without treading on someone's hand. "Not if you want me to. I'm never nice to people anyway, let alone to people who are using my friends' bodies like ventriloquist's dolls. You haven't even got an excuse for me to be nice to you. And he is SO going to kick your butt. I'll wake up all these and we'll find a way to break out of here. And kill you." she added, almost as an afterthought.

"Really? Because I'm sure they'll believe you if you tell them that your 'friend.' really is being controlled. What am I saying? Of course they will. And their response will be damage limitation and Almasy will have a lifespan shorter than a snowflake in hell." 

Seifer leant back against the wall and took another drag in such a familiar manner that Quistis started to doubt what he, what it, had told her. Maybe he was just playing some evil little mind game. Politics rather than punching had never been Seifer's modus operandi, but maybe he'd matured. Whatever it was, it was making her trigger finger itch like hell. It was confusing her, and Quistis hated being confused, because it implied some kind of mental deficit, though to be fair it wasn't something that happened often. 

"In fact, I'll be nice and let him tell you himself." It, him, whatever, gave a nasty smirk that was still unmistakably Seifer's. She'd seen it many times before, back at Garden, when he'd still been in charge of the Disciplinary Committee and one of the few people, that could piss Squall off, and Squall had just sat there as Seifer taunted him, with whitening knuckles and a look on his face that meant that he was trying hard to avoid jumping up at Seifer and strangling him. Sometimes it had worked. Squall's self-control was legendary.

It had exactly the same effect on her, a grin that made her want to bruise her knuckles on his teeth.

Quistis opened her mouth to tell him to get lost when he broke in. "You have five minutes."

And his expression changed. 

It was like watching a shadow pass very swiftly over water.

Seifer blinked, looked slightly startled and rocked back on his heels, slamming one arm against the wall to stop himself falling. He reached for the bars with his other hand, face still shadowed, and Quistis took a smooth step back as her hand went straight to her gun. Her other hand moved to Save The Queen.

"Get the hell away from me, you bastard." 

"Quistis, listen. Put the gun _down_." Seifer rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "Fucking bastard. I'll kill it. I'll fucking kill it." He sounded tired, and also very angry.

"Prove you're you." She folded her arms over her chest.

"What do you want me to do, beg? Cos if I do that, you'll _know_ it's not me." 

She thought for a second and beckoned him over. "Come here."

Seifer took a wary step towards the barred door. 

"Closer."

"Hyne, Quistis, if I come any closer I'll be.."

"Closer. I want to look at your eyes. " She curled her hands round the bars.

Seifer managed to look both puzzled and acutely embarrassed. "Huh?" 

Quistis snapped "For Hyne's sake!", dropped the weapons and grabbed him by his coat collar, wrenching him closer to the bars with the decaying sheepskin lining clenched in her fists. It was slightly damp beneath her hands. She pulled his face down to minimise their difference in height, forcing him to bend his head awkwardly to the side so she could stare into his face.

His pupils were slightly dilated with shock, but his eyes were their familiar mocking green.

The fleece ripped off in her hands and Seifer jumped back as if she'd just bitten him, snapping "What the hell?" He scooped up the end of the cigarette from the floor where he'd dropped it as she grabbed him and took a deep drag, relaxing as the nicotine kicked in to something slightly less tense than a violin string. 

"You aren't evil."

"Don't sound so surprised. Doesn't mean I'm _nice_." He sounded slightly insulted. 

"I've got a bone to pick with you" Quistis stepped closer.

"Yeah? Get in line." Seifer looked slightly uncomfortable, or just more so, holding onto the cigarette like it was some kind of life preserver. He inhaled. 

"Five years?"

"I was possessed. It didn't mean anything. And anyway. It's your fault. That skirt. All the class wanted to sleep with you." He sounded defensive , even with the whispering. 

"And like you never tried that excuse before. 'I didn't do my homework, miss, cos I was possessed.'" She mimicked a whine and Seifer winced. She bent to pick her whip up and noticed that he wasn't even trying to stare down her top. In fact he seemed to be leaning away from her. "Seifer, that class was half women. "

He raised both hands defensively and spoke around the cigarette. "Like I said, the whole class. Bitchy. Go sharpen your teeth on someone else while you're not wasting the last three minutes of my sanity. "

"I knew fighting with a whip was a mistake. At least you just got a sword. You didn't have to sit through three years of bondage jokes."

"What happened after three years?"

"I got better. So they stopped. Can't imagine why. And have I told you yet that you are so stupid? I had so many reservations abut this whole thing the whole restaurant was packed out and then we just happen to get into this kind of mess?"

"Huh?"

"Guess not. You may think you can kick everything else's butt, but when it comes to mental defences you've got more holes than a colander. " 

"Like we could have done anything else? Spur of the moment. And most things don't get up from a bullet in the head." Seifer spoke in the resentful way he had when he couldn't inflict damage. 

"So you have to go pick a fight with the one thing that doesn't? I know they always say you can't get into Garden if you're a complete moron but in your case I really do wonder. We've got twenty other soldiers who, let's face it, have cannon fodder written all over them, but no, you have to go and do something damn stupid on your own without telling anybody."

"Hey, teamwork's great. Gives them someone else to shoot at."

"The thing that's _really_ scary about that is you're probably serious" Quistis began to relax a little bit as they both dropped into their default mode of bickering. 

'Scuse me, but I'm the one who's busy being possessed here… I didn't see _you_ thinking up a plan, super-brain, so don't knock mine. If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

"But it didn't work. That's _why_ it's stupid. And I thought 'no teamwork' was your motto. The number of times I had to tell you there is no 'I' in team."

"No, my motto's 'Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last and don't ever volunteer to do anything.'"

"Well, you sure screwed that one up big time."

"I'm working on it. It'd make my life so much simpler. And longer." Seifer wondered how the hell he got into this situation.

.At this point in time the best thing that was going to happen to him was that some soldiers were going to lock him up forever. He'd probably racked up about four death sentences by now. They'd probably hire someone to use Phoenix Down on him just so they could make him more dead.

He sighed and thought he hadn't got time to think.

"Look, last time…" Getting brainwashed, he decided, was something that if it happened once was too much. " It was..like being drunk. Well, you wouldn't know, being teetotal." He said the last word with the kind of dark mistrustfulness that you usually associated with sentences like 'so..you like to stamp on small furry animals for fun?.'

"Like you know, you know what you're doing. It just made everything easier. Kind of mellow-dreamy. Even when I fed Rinoa to Adel or tortured Squall, hell, it seemed a good idea at the time."

"Like you'd never enjoy that normally.."

He grinned reluctantly. "Okay, but there's a whole lot of difference between wishing you could and you know, doing it. Such a fuckin' idiot."

"Who?" Quistis asked.

"Him." . He thought." Both of us. Me, ' cause I was pretty damn stupid, and him, cos the day I admit that guy isn't a complete twat it'll be a cold day in Hell."

"So how's this different?"

"This ..it's like I don't feel anything and I can't do anything about it. Like someone else's thoughts. Like my mind isn't fucking mine any more. Bastard." He said it awkwardly, like he was trying to explain it to himself as well.

Quistis was still standing at the bars, checking her watch and looking worried.

Seifer shrugged. "Forget it. You got any magic?" 

She guessed what he was thinking. "No." 

"Any other ways to..stop it?" The last word was dragged out. Seifer hated asking for help, though he usually had no problem demanding other things, like money.

"Well- you could wrap tinfoil round your head."

He paced. "This isn't the damn time for you to develop a sense of humour, Quistis." Two minutes till I lose my mind and you're not bloody helping."

"Well, technically, it's forty-seven seconds." 

"Well, _technically_ it can go fuck itself."

She thought. "Don't think so. Circle of salt, might, if we had some. Horseshoes, same Cold iron, well, you've got so much of that I'm surprised you can walk, so that's no good. I'm sorry."

"Not as sorry as me."

She hadn't got an answer to that.

"Hell, at least I beat the lung cancer." Seifer leant back against the wall again, and this time there was something tense about his face that made her realise that he was afraid, and that he hated it, hated the thing for making him feel it, and that probably the best thing she could do was ignore it in case she didn't want to be the target of sudden imminent violence. Seifer's usual response to not being able to _do _anything being to get mad and hit someone. 

A fatal flaw. Fatal for the other person, anyway. 

"See, this is why they should have sent Squall. He'd shoot me through the heart faster than he could say "And you're to blame." "

"He wouldn't have done that."

"No, he would have aimed for the head, 'cos he doesn't think I've got one." He scowled. "Anyway, I've got better things to do with my last twenty seconds than talk about that asshole." The cigarette was almost down to the filter. "Or you can shoot me now,, 'cause I'm not bloody sure I can do it myself." His anger seemed to have cooled to a dark hopelessness that was so entirely unlike Seifer it scared her more than his usual smirking tough-guy aggression. He flicked his last knife out of the sleeve of his jacket, gave it a long look and then threw it blindly in a long ragged arc along the corridor. It scored a deep white slash down on one of the walls and clattered to the floor. The echo went a long way. 

"Can't do _anything_ fuckin' right."

"Look, I'm sorry."

She looked up at him through the bars, over the glasses, and Seifer thought of all the times he'd idly fantasised her in rather similar scenarios that always seemed to end with her wearing very little clothing. Dream. Right. More like a nightmare. 

He leaned closer to the bars, watching her as she glanced at her watch, saw the blinking numerals and caught her up a fierce one-armed hug, holding the cigarette out of the way before he stepped back and took a long deep drag. A kind of frayed rage seemed to simmer behind his eyes. 

There was a thin greasy-slick feel to the air around them that spread out and felt like the calm at the centre of a storm, the eye of a tornado. The Galbadians slept on at Quistis' feet, oblivious and snoring, and although Rahel, the nearest, threw an arm over her head and mumbled something incoherent and foreign, they didn't wake.

It was silent in a kind of cold muzzy way, the tension drawn out near to breaking point. 

And like battle, after the waiting, everything began to happen at once.

Quistis' watch beeped, marking the hour, and Seifer shivered and raised his hands to the side of his head, fingers spread wide as if to block a sound only he could hear. The cigarette butt dropped from his hands as the tension popped like a soap-bubble and the little sounds of the corridor came flooding back, together with the dripping of water and the slight smell of damp and rotting things.

Quistis drew back from the bars again, cautiously. They left little flakes of rust on her gloves like dried blood. She checked the whip at her belt, lying coiled like a sleeping snake, but knew that she wouldn't use it. Strange, as she could think of at least four occasions where she would have given practically anything for an excuse to kill, or at least slightly maim, Seifer Almasy -Hyne, the man could be annoying sometimes- but somehow it wasn't any fun when he was asking her to.

Plus, of course, logic dictated that shooting him wasn't actually going to kill the spirit, so therefore there was no point, as it'd just have to find another host, and guess who was the nearest? 

She ticked off her options on gloved fingers but stopped when her hand curled into a fist. Sit tight, observe, and react. That was the logical thing to do right now. Logic, Quistis' main lifebelt in the sea of uncertainty and sloppy thinking.

She watched and waited. 

Seifer looked up and gave a smug satisfied smile like the cat who got the cream, which would have erased all of Quistis' doubts if she hadn't already known the truth. 

They held another brief showdown with their eyes. It was getting to the point where the glances across the corridor were more like high noon at the OK Corral. 

Quistis broke the silence first. Her voice sounded tired and sharp, even to her own ears.

"So you're what? Just popping by to say hello?"

"Maybe I wanted to see you."

"No, you didn't. You wanted something. What?"

"Maybe he wanted to see you."

She wondered why the hell it thought she was so important and then , with a cold feeling in her belly, knew, If it had control of Seifer's body, maybe it could read his mind too. It had to. It was the only reason it would have come down here. She'd bet Seifer had been looking for her. 

"Hyne, you've become a cynic," he said. "Where's all that charming optimism of yours, Quistis? You sound like me."

"Not like you. Like him." Great, she thought, and at the same time hated it for messing with his head, with hers. Seifer Almasy, the Cynicism Fairy.   
"What are you, anyway?"

"That's _two_ questions."

"So what?" The anger burned her like a cold flame. She remembered the old stories her adopted grandmother had told her, sitting on her lap by the old hearth with the smell of baking shortbread. Tales of fairy deals, bargains and standing stones at midnight. There had been darker stories, too, of hags and imps and bargains gone sour as spilt milk, only to be averted by clever words or cold iron, opened scissors and knives. The old woman had been wrong about that, as she'd been wrong about so many other things later. And Quistis had never had much time for fairy tales, even as a child. Even at that age, she'd never been so stupid as to believe in all those stories where good defeated evil and everybody got what was coming to them, be it a princess bride or a pair of red-hot dancing shoes. Unlike some she could name….

__

"Do you really want to know, girl?" 

The voice wasn't Seifer's anymore, it had moved while they were talking to the shadows to the left of the corridor and although she strained her eyes-and she had good eyes-she saw nothing apart from a red glow that would have been the end of his cigarette, if she hadn't remembered he'd dropped it on the floor. 

It reminded her of the eyes of the wolves.

Quistis shivered. 

Her eyes fought to make something out of the shadows, focusing so hard fluorescent dots pinwheeled across her vision and blood swished through her ears. The red light went out.

"Seifer?" She hated to use his name, but realising that she really didn't have anything else to call it, 'hey, evil spirit of the creepy house that seems to be able to possess things' not really being an option. 

Her voice echoed slightly in the gloom. There was a tiny sound from the corner that could have been a boot scraping against rock, and then the silence of nothing, which mercenaries very quickly learned to tell from the silence of someone being there and trying very hard to keep quiet.

Quistis' breath steamed in the cold air. She sighed and slumped back against the wall, feeling the cold of it against her back and then her ass as she slid down it to the floor. Excitement over. Nothing to do apart from sleep and worry. And didn't you just know it, the worry was stopping her from sleeping. 

Shame. She glanced at the creased pages of the SeeD manual left forgotten on the floor and decided against reading it again. She knew it all off by heart anyway. If she had another book, or a baseball, or a journal.. Yeah. Diary entry number two hundred and forty four. Bumped into Seifer Almasy last night. He seemed a bit off colour. I think either he had flu or he'd been possessed by the spirit of the evil castle ghost. Each possibility is so exciting I'm officially thrilled. Locked in castle with no hope of escaping. Send help.

The smell of nicotine drifted up from the floor from the fag-end Seifer had dropped. She reached through the bars and picked it up in an oddly sentimental manner, looked at it for a minute and then threw it away as far as she could manage through the door. The scent still hung in the air, hiding the misty old-building smell of mould and water with a kind of musty acid sharpness that was all Seifer.

He'd smelled like that when he'd kissed her.

He'd kissed her. 

In her head a part of her sat head in hands and mourned the loss of several million brain cells and a large chunk of professional conduct.

It wasn't even like it had been a particularly _nice _kiss, but that didn't stop her from wondering what he kissed like when he wasn't being possessed by an evil spirit,.

Maybe she was going mad. Quistis had long ago decided that she had a malformed slot in her brain for all that girly stuff.

At Garden, she'd always liked Squall better. Maybe it was the fact that he hadn't given her any trouble at all, compared to Seifer. During the last year it had seemed like she was having to bail Seifer out of something every day, ranging from all-too-frequent and bloody fights, which he always managed somehow to pass off as training rather than brawls, to the time when he'd pasted pictures of her face on a glamour model's body and circulated the clips round the garden's intranet, along with a strip poker game that allowed you to remove bits of clothing as the game progressed. 

Maybe she should book herself a psychologist's appointment when she got back.

If she got back.

She should try to go to sleep. One of the first things they taught cadets in a situation like this, it was always a good idea to eat or sleep while you could, just so you were full and rested for when there was something they could do. 

She shifted, accidentally knocking her boot against Rahel's outstretched hand. The older woman was lying rolled into a compact ball shape, knees tucked to her chest, but she rolled over at Quistis' touch, waking fast, like most SeeDs. Quistis was just thankful none of them had woken earlier. Now that would have been a nice mess to try to explain away…

The older woman's voice was still muzzy with sleep and her accent was more prominent. "You okay? You look..weird." 

Quistis sighed. "Fine." She really wasn't, but she knew Rahel didn't want to hear all about her problems, and given her loyalties, it probably wouldn't be such a good idea to tell her just what had happened. She huddled into a tighter ball, arms hugging her knees. Yeah. Get out of this somehow, and then go back to Garden, earn money to go on another mission so she could be in another situation like this. Wow. What a life. Join the Garden, they'd said. See the world. 

Rahel rolled over and seemed to go back to sleep. Quistis was grateful. She really didn't want to talk, especially to someone who she didn't know. The depression settled over her like a well-worn coat, inviting her to wallow in misery, but she pushed it aside and got up to try the door again. It still didn't open, but then she hadn't really expected it to. The unyielding metal was frozen cold under her hands and the silence lay tired and thick around her. 

Her watch said six a.m., which meant the sun should be coming up in a couple of hours, but then down here it was always going to be dark, apart from the creepy dim lighting that seemed to come from nowhere. It wasn't a comforting thought that she'd probably forget whether the time on her watch was morning or evening, midnight or noon, if they stayed down here much longer. Should have sprung for a twenty-four hour one, she thought wryly. It seemed several centuries since she'd woken up in the cell and ice ages could have passed in the time since she'd last left Garden. 

Ice. Hyne, it was cold. The warm spot she'd created for herself on the floor had evaporated as soon as she'd moved, shirt pulling out of trousers and air hissing down the tiny gaps between her face and fur hood. Ice was forming in tiny slow crystals 

on the water running down the walls, but thankfully it seemed to drain to something else much deeper through cracks in the floor, otherwise they'd already be knee-deep and well on the way to becoming novelty ice-cubes.

Quistis bent and unrolled her sleeping bag from her pack, wrapping around her heedless of muddy boots. Wrapped round her it created a snug cocoon that wasn't entirely warm or seriously cold but something in-between, that at least had to be better than standing up and freezing. She settled down in it, hoping the warmth would send her to sleep, but either the coffee or the nerves seemed to have hot-wired her nervous system, sending it straight to red alert. No more sleep, at least not for a while.

When she lifted a hand to her head, slipping it between her hair and the hood for extra warmth, the strands fell between her fingers in sticky lank locks. A ridge of dried blood and scab ridged her scalp and the cropped ends of her trimmed hair bristled in her palm as she explored it gingerly. There was no heat, except what she would have expected, no swelling and almost no pain. He'd done a good job. A nasty little thought suggested that Seifer probably had practice caring for injuries in various bar fights and brawls. Or maybe he'd actually paid attention in the first-aid lectures, although she seemed to remember him arguing that only losers and people too stupid to get out of the way got hurt. She'd have liked to be a fly on the wall when the doctor was cleaning his face up at the end of his and Squall's 'training' duel, although Squall at least seemed more proud than anything else of the scars that decorated both men's faces. And Seifer would definitely be proud of Squall's. …

Men. Couldn't live with them, couldn't live without them.

And living in these kind of situations was never easy at the best of times. Carry on like this and she'd _never_ get her instructor's badge back.

Quistis resolved to do better next time, if there was one. She also resolved to keep her resolutions, for a change.

She slept, at last.

Seifer fought.

It was like trying to be two people at the same time. Occasionally other thoughts and feelings that couldn't possibly be his flickered across his mind, mostly feeling of hungry contentment and pure, fierce joy at being alive and Seifer couldn't remember ever having been that happy, at least not recently, without the addition of mind-altering drugs. It was anticipating something, moving busily and greedily towards it, and at the same time he was sure that it wasn't a good thing, or at least not for him. It was hard to keep himself together. He was losing it, literally, figuratively and in every way that mattered. 

It was like being caught in a river, trying desperately to hold onto his personality even as the water fought to carry it away. Cold. Frightening. Almost impossible. Seifer hadn't ever been in a situation like this before. He guessed not a lot of people had, or at least not for very long. He'd probably been nearer than most, though, like Rinoa.

Not something to be proud of.

Soon he'd give up, let the fragments of his psyche trickle away. Dammit. He'd never been any good at this kind of mental shit anyway. Wasn't it Quistis who'd said he hadn't got any self-discipline? 

It was very hard to think. 

Other memories of the thing kept intruding, an uninvited guest crashing the party. They were mostly cold and dark, with lots of trees, Occasionally ghostly fragments of faces would flicker for a second, and then be washed away. All were blurred except one, a face that looked like some kind of statue, female and oval. It seemed to glow, and at the same time there was a feeling of a kind of peace, deceptively reassuring, and inviting as a cliff edge to a depressive.

At first he'd tried sorting through the memories, but as soon as he'd stopped focusing on one image it would slide through his brain like mercury and try as he might he couldn't hold more than one image for more than a few seconds. It was kind of like subliminal advertising, but instead of making him want to go out and buy hotdogs or something, he was starting to have ambivalent feelings about strange sparkly women.

Maybe this was what it was like being brain-damaged. Maybe he'd be one of those poor old sods who spent the last years of their life in a wheelchair, dribbling and staring and needing people to help them to the toilet. Urgh. 

Seifer found it ironic that he'd criticised GFs so damn much. All that trying to save memories that he hadn't liked that much anyway just to be sure he could always trust himself and now his entire life was being unravelled like a ball of string.

He tried to focus. 

The sudden explosion of light was a huge relief. Seeing out of his own eyes was like trying to look through a goldfish bowl-it was _there_, but all slightly distorted, and he couldn't get to it no matter how hard he tried. But it was light.

Clear glass words in his head like cut crystal. _Still there?_

And a fresh rush of shapes pictures images all crashed into his head, as he drowned in memories that lost focus as soon as they slipped away and which, like dreams, all seemed terribly important at the time

..trees.

………tantalising headrushtwistingfightingwaterand the feel of rain on his face or blood or tears.

A single captured image of a drop of water falling into a pool. It made a sound like the breaking of a mouse's heart. andeverythingrushingpastsofastfloatingdrowningandwhythehellwon'titstopmakeitstop

The head again. 

He focused on it, forcing himself to make sense of it, dammit.

There must be something here that he could use as a weapon.

…..treesinthedarkofthenightbloodonthesnow

…blood on the pavement.

A stone. People bowed.

..boughs, branches over the moon

And with a force that almost knocked him back and scattered his thoughts once and for all, the outline of a carved face. 

He held onto it like grim death, like an anchor in the rushing sea of memories that weren't his own. This time the image stuck in his mind and the crushing pressure of the spirit on his thoughts loosened, just a little.

The world swam and came back into focus. It was like trying to fight for a view in a crowd, the same sense of pressure and crowding, metaphorical elbows in the face. He hung on. 

Better, but still not good.

Seifer felt muscles twist and flex as the thing walked up stairs, saw high stone walls pass as in a dream and heard the trickling of water with his own ears. At least they felt like his, but in an oddly dissociated way, and it was like all the synapses weren't connecting, like being paralysed. He had no control, no power, and if there was one thing he hated more than not being able to hit anything, it was being powerless. Weak. Defenceless. 

Everyone knew that if you weren't a hunter, then you were a victim. And Seifer had made up his mind very early not to be a victim. 

This situation had now changed.

He watched dumbly from his own eyes as the thing wearing his body like a favourite coat walked up a flight of stairs, turned right, and then as the room spread out into a large hall.

It looked familiar and after a few seconds of silent watching (stay still, dammit) he decided it was the entrance hall, again. He mentally gave himself a good kick in the ass for not finding Quistis earlier. It had to be some kind of magic, or okay, maybe just a map. He'd walked _miles_, Seifer thought, and took a second's evil pleasure in the thought that the spirit was getting his blisters.

The thing walked across the room, confident, like it knew where it was going, to a spot just to the right of the main door. It was still dark outside, the velvety kind of dark that came from light reflecting off fallen snow, eerily luminescent.

Seifer watched his own hand reach out and his other hand pull the glove off.

His right hand was then laid flat on a slight depression in the stone at chest height. He could feel the cold stone against his palm. There was a moment of building pressure. He studied the lines on the back of his hand with detached photographic intensity, pale tan crisscrossed with scars and healing grazes, blunt bitten nails.

The pressure released. 

It felt like casting magic back at Garden, or mostly the same, the same focus and intensity of the magic pouring out of him, except in reverse. If it had felt, earlier, like he was being swept away by a torrent, then this was springwater in the desert, but he knew that it wouldn't be long until the magic rejuvenated the spirit enough to notice him again, and then it would crush him with the force of water pouring from a dam. 

He felt the spirit's relief as the flow of magic nourished it too, fat contentment, then a thread of uncertainty and he knew it searched for him. The probing lens of his thoughts sought him like a magnifying glass, pinning him, leaving him open to scrutiny.

Nowhere to hide. 

__

Little puppet, dance for me.

The words cut like scissors.

__

Go to her. Bring her to me. Do I need to explain?

He screamed as the full force of the spirit's power crashed into him like a hurricane, colliding with his own memories of Rinoa, her weight on his arm as he dragged her to Adel's tomb, blade at her throat. She'd screamed. too.

"Seifer! Stop it! Haven't you done enough!? I know you're not like that!"

and he thought wryly, you never really knew me at all, did you, but he couldn't remember thinking that at the time, it had been all dreams and hazy sweet certainty and Edea/Ultimecia, the bitterness of defeat and betrayal and revenge like acid in his throat. The chunks of memories he recalled slotted together like some kind of awful jigsaw, his own personal disaster, a million pieces and still no glue to hold it all together.

He heard his own voice. "Can't go back now! I can't go anywhere! The sorceresses as one! That is Ultimecia's WISH!" and thought wearily how he sounded so fucking young, and suddenly it wasn't Rinoa in his arms, in his dream, black silky hair sleek in front of him, all blue dress and idealism, it was Quistis.

She stared at him like he'd betrayed her

(but then of course he has and it all feels so damn natural, it all keeps on flooding back)

__

bring her

and opened her mouth and he knew what she was going to say, knew exactly, because she'd already said it and then he remembered that it wasn't her,

(but it is)

__

Her

that that was then and this was now and his mind felt like it was shattering into pieces, his whole world crashing down… again.

"......Seifer. No more...Please?"

(as if that's going to stop anything)

__

NEED

and he opened his mouth to say "Rinoa...",

(Quistis….)

hearing, remembering, because he was having to remind himself it wasn't really there not really there but it is

(was)

and he couldn't stop it, just the same thing, over and over.

"Seifer!!! NO!"

and the cry echoed through every fibre and bone in his body…….

"..not againIwon'tIwon'tyoucan'tmakemejustfuckingtry." 

And he realised he was shouting.

Lalala. Romantic tension _finally_……hehehe.

Many thanks to all who reviewed. It makes me happy. Oh yeah, my sister commented about all of my reviews-most people reading this are not in prisons or asylums, are you? I mean, it's okay if you are. Family-the best way to undermine your confidence… 

And a small gift from my sister. GB, the PG version:

Chapter one:

Seifer: (censored, censored, censored, censored, censored,)

(censored)

(censored)

Quistis: (censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored,

censored, censored, censored, censored, censored,)

and so on…..

I think she thinks I swear too much. Or something. 

Anyway…

Breaker-one, (ta! Re the characterisation thing-I think you can do Seifer two ways, One, he can be Squall's antagonist, but then he has to lose, eventually, so Squall can win. And if you lose too much you just look lame. Or then you can jump on the mind-control bandwagon and do the Seifer-redemption thing, which is much more interesting. ) caroline, (always forever) CelesteSpring (twice! **Bows** thankyou! I hope you like this one as much.) dust traveller (everyone go read Shards of Chaos, which rocks muchly) elfGurl306, (Thanks. J I try to update every two weeks, at the weekend) Imuthis, (..the cliffhangers…I don't plan it like that, it just seems the obvious place to stop.) and seventh ( why thankyou! Most people think my music taste is strange. But I LIKE it *grins*) 

Next chapter-lots of action. Hope everyone understood this one*crosses fingers*


	13. Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

This chapter's reposted. I'm really sorry about the html. Had to swop the doc. between computers cos mine's finally given up the ghost. Aaargh.

I've this creeping

Suspicion that things here are not as they seem.

Reassure me,

Why does it feel as if I'm in too deep?

Yes, I have done wrong…..

But what I did I thought needed be done,

I swear…….

Dave Matthews Band-The Stone(edit)

The words echoed around the room…_trytrytrytrytrytry__…_

Seifer stared at his hand like a junkie on a bad trip. 

Still looked the same. The difference was that he could move it himself.

He whirled, searching desperately for the thing among the shadows and pale flickering light.

It wasn't hard to find. It hung a few metres away, almost within touching distance, if he'd wanted to do such a stupid thing. Blowing gently in the draughts that rippled through the hall, it resembled an animated column of dry ice. 
    
    It didn't look so scary, but then Seifer knew that appearances could be deceptive, with Quistis the living proof.
    
    Seifer scrabbled around, searching desperately for weapons. He still had his gun, but _that was going to be about as much use as a toothpick against a T-Rexaur. In all the adventure vids he'd watched, the hero always had to fight the bad guy in a hall with lots of swords hanging over the fire, or at least lots of stuffed animal heads with big, pointy horns. This one was empty, although to be fair he supposed it was a hall. He'd hate to fight the thing in a tunnel. _
    
    Maybe he _was_ the bad guy.  
    
    Hell, it had worked last time, and he didn't think heroes got dirty.  However, Seifer was mostly sure that when you were fighting alone against something that could steal your soul and use your body like a sock puppet, you were probably on the Side Of Good. The whole "hopelessly and stupidly outnumbered" bit certainly seemed to fit, except, he thought sourly, when you were on the winning side.
    
    The spirit ghosted around the edges of the room, watching him like a hawk, but so far, not trying to attack, which was okay with him. If he let it touch him again, it was all over. His foot clinked against something that felt heavy and out of place, and Seifer bent down and groped for the object, not taking his eyes off the thing. His fingers brushed metal. It was heavy and cold, so cold that he could feel it through his gloves. It rolled slightly. 
    
    The pipe. Seifer's free hand closed around it. He must have dropped it after he'd used it to open the door to go look for Quistis.  Thank Hyne.
    
    With the other hand he tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to manoeuvre the torch into a position where the three inches of charred wood left wouldn't scorch his wrist every time he bent down.  The flames licked up, making him uncomfortably aware that the only thing standing between him and certain extreme pain was a few inches of cloth. He needed something that would burn. Books. People. Witches. Wood. But there wasn't any wood in the hall, or any of the other things either.  The thing circled, slowly, like a shark. It didn't seem to like fire. Pity he didn't have any magic. He'd have burned its ass.
    
    Seifer's eyes slid past it, scanning the apparently featureless wall. 
    
    _There?_
    
    There was a slight mark on one of the stones nearest him, just to the right of the door they'd come in by.  It seemed to flicker and crawl in the firelight as he stared at it with eyes unused to the dark. Not much to go on, but it was enough for the time being. There was a familiar feel to it, déjà vu with teeth. 
    
     And if he was wrong, he'd just have to be dead wrong. Seifer shivered. Or walking-dead wrong, depending on just how much he'd pissed it off. 
    
     There was hardly any sound in the room, just the slight crackling of the torch, his breathing steaming in the cold air and the scuff of his boots on stone as he turned to keep his eyes on the circling wraith.
    
    The spirit made no sound at all.
    
    He threw the torch, hard. It ducked easily out of the way and the brand exploded against the wall behind it, showering flaming dry wood and embers everywhere. A couple of the sparks passed right back through the misty outline of the spirit and landed on Seifer's coat. He brushed them of with a curse. And a few landed on one of the old tapestries, this one a particularly baroque version of a girl stroking a unicorn.
    
    If you squinted a bit, the frayed face looked a bit like Quistis. 
    
    _That was the best you could do?_
    
    It closed in. Seifer's grin was wolfish and held absolutely no humour. 
    
    The tapestry ignited with a sharp _whoomph__, flames rising high and dripping down to the floor on long strings of frayed yarn. The girl's face crumbled into ash. _
    
    Just a few minutes of cheaply bought time, but it might just be long enough. 
    
    There was a weird reptilian hiss as the spirit whipped round and recoiled from the blaze, shading its insubstantial face with equally wraithlike arms.
    
     He grabbed the pipe with both hands and swung it wildly at the wall. The shock reverberated through his hands as it hit with a heavy metallic _clunk, twisted the bar, feeling stone loosening, and yanked it out, swinging it like a baseball bat. There was a high wail and the wall crumbled, revealing some kind of object made of stone._
    
    As Seifer got a closer look at it, he realised it was some kind of head and his first thought was _bloody hell, before he realised that no way was anything organic going to survive that long. Instead it was a rough lump of some kind of sparkly grey stone, shaped into an oval woman's face, with the suggestion of long hair framing each side.  The eyes were open, but without pupils, zombielike. It wasn't painted and there was no ornamentation apart from a deep spiral shaped groove that curled down from the corner of one eye.  He guessed it was pretty, if you liked that kind of thing. Well done, at least. And he'd seen it before._
    
    And something just clicked.  Seifer's train of thought, temporarily derailed, went something like this.
    
    The spirit got power from the head. Destroy the head, destroy the ghost's power, destroy the ghost.
    
    You didn't have to be Quistis to work that out.
    
    Easy. 
    
    The wall had been packed with some kind of chalky core which drifted out and hade him cough, so he almost missed the thing as it swept past like a very angry jet plane. He dropped the pipe and rolled as the thing went over his head with the speed of a hare on double espresso and wrapped itself protectively round the stone.
    
     Seifer though he could hear a faint keening, high up in the roof, and then he really didn't have time  to think about anything else as it turned and flew at him, He was fighting purely on reflex now, months of training kicking in, but you couldn't fight something you couldn't touch. No time for all the brutally elegant strategies they'd taught at Garden or any of the careful gunblade moves he'd practised in the training centres.
    
    It just had to be lucky once. He had to be lucky all the time, and he was tiring fast.  Fast? Hell, he was screwed already.  
    
    His hand touched a piece of rock on the floor and he scooped it up, turning the movement into a dodge and then a dive as the thing swept overhead. It was a good job it seemed to be more bothered about the head than anything else, because it kept making little feinting circles away from it, seem to gain courage as he got further away, he'd duck or dodge, it'd turn and block him before he could get back.  He threw the rock.
    
    As Seifer had hoped it passed through the mistlike body of the wraith just like the embers had, without even slowing, and then arced to land against the head with a soft cluck. It didn't cause any significant damage, as the statue looked like it was made of granite or something, with all those little sparkly crystals, but it did knock it sideways, enough to send it tilting over the edge. The thing rushed to the head, keening, and Seifer used the brief moment's rest to pick up another rock from the floor, watching cautiously as it wrapped itself around the stone like a veil to hide its features. It screamed murder, and the scream seemed to radiate from every corner of the room
    
    _Killyoukillyoukillyoukillyoukillyoukillyou__…_
    
    Get in line, he privately thought. The second rock bounced heavy in his hand and he raised his arm to throw it. 
    
    The thing moved so fast he couldn't even see it, sweeping towards him with another high thin scream. He dived, knees meeting the stone with a brief stab of pain, rolled  and flung his arms over his head in a futile gesture, throwing the rock at it reflexively, well, it was either that or drop it on the floor, and that sure wasn't going to do a hell of a lot of good. Like the first one, it went straight through the spirit, but Seifer heard it glance off the wall to the right with a solid _chock and thought, oh, shit. Missed._
    
    And the thing was just..there.
    
    There was a moment of startled surprise before he realised that it had sunk its arm, or the bit of smoke that passed for its arm, neatly through his layers of frayed clothes just below his ribs on his left side. There was a strange moment of freeze-frame as he stared straight at it, eyes widened in surprise.
    
     It felt like a sharp cold pain, like taking a breath of freezing air in and holding it for so long your lungs started to burn, like drinking ice water on a really hot day.  He couldn't breathe, running through long lines of vicious swearwords in his head as a pit of cold dread started to form in his stomach.
    
     And then it stopped. 
    
    Well, he didn't feel possessed, not unless it was going for the really subtle approach. The spirit recoiled with, he would have sworn, a slight expression of surprise on its completely featureless face. It withdrew its hand, inspecting it curiously. 
    
    Seifer touched the spot where it had gone in, but his flesh felt warm and alive under his fingers. No pain, no welling wetness or the blood he'd half been expecting. He swore softly and gratefully.
    
    He'd been asleep before. Maybe this meant it didn't work, couldn't work unless he was asleep. Or unconscious. An interesting thought he didn't much feel like testing at this time.
    
    So if it couldn't stop him, fine. Mission accomplished in one easy hold-it-above-your-head and drop-it. The realisation was blinding and sweet as water in the desert.   He could still get out of this. Sure, then he just had a hell of a lot of other problems to be getting on with, but this, this would finally be easy, like he'd thought. 
    
    Famous last words.
    
    He levered himself up off the floor, looking around for the wraith.
    
    At first there was no sign of it, and he wondered hazily if it had self-destructed, maybe out of disappointment. Seifer examined the rafters carefully, and although a couple of empty cobwebs gave him pause, he began to hope that it really could be gone.    His gaze slid over the wall, floor, and then came to rest on the head.  It stared blankly back at him. It looked like it could be worth a lot of money, back in the city, but he thought he'd pass. 
    
    It looked…kind of misty. 
    
    A moment later he realised that of course, the spirit was wrapped around the head. It gave him pause for all of three seconds before he reasoned that, since it couldn't really do anything until he went to sleep, it wasn't going to be much of an obstacle. Of course, if he planned to have a rest before stomping its home into a million little sparkly pieces, that could be some kind of big deal, but hell, by the time he slept again it'd be dead.  
    
    Heh. Taste the revenge of Seifer Almasy, evil spirit.  Eat floor.
    
    He squinted. The slight ice-blue mist seemed to be thickening and the wraith wrapped itself tighter around the head, gaining strength from somewhere, and then slowly began to coalesce. The features of the head began to be obscured even more and then disappeared. The soft greenish light in the hall went out, giving the room even more of a funeral air, lit only by the flickering dregs of the tapestry that made shadows reel and dance in the corners. In the moonlight the stone looked dark, like spilled blood. 
    
    Seifer approached cautiously. The shadows in the niche seemed to be getting longer, and in the sudden flare of light as another hanging caught fire he could see a dark shape slowly rising. 
    
    This was not good. The room was changing around him, losing size and grandeur .Holes appeared in walls as the thing drew back its power and a dead bat dropped from the ceiling, making him jump. 
    
    Really, he supposed he should feel honoured as it was spending all of this power on him, but seeing as he'd been reduced from a cadet of one of the most feared mercenary fighting forces in the world to throwing rocks at something he knew he couldn't really hurt, give it ten more minutes and he'd have to stand there and poke it with a pointy stick. 

Dammit. He'd always wanted to go out with a bang, or at least with more people watching, a wish that he was sure would be granted if the Galbadians got hold of him.

Seifer pulled his gun and loaded it fast, catching a stray bullet with his other hand as he fumbled the last one and slotting it neatly into place.  The gun chambered with a click.   For about the forty-seventh time since he'd left Marduk he wished he had Hyperion. Maybe he should have kept it, but at the time it had just been too much of a risk. Maybe. 

 The room had changed completely by the time he glanced up. It was still old, right, but it looked..older, in a way. Older, and with more holes. Trees jutted from the walls, bare and leafless, and the wind cut through the gaps howling like a lost soul and blowing in sharp windwhipped snowflakes. He shivered, teeth chattering. The gun was heavy and freezing in his hand.

The Revenge of Seifer Almasy was just going to take a little more time than he'd originally thought.

Seifer advanced, cautiously. The transformation of the room had created so many new shadows, he wasn't anything near sure where exactly it was. 

The noise of his careful footsteps echoed round the hall, flagstones now worn and ridged with the wear of a thousand feet and Hyne knew how many years.  It made them bloody hard to walk on. 

There was a scuttling noise from the shadow behind him and Seifer swung round, spinning back again almost as fast as he sensed a movement in one of the very farthest shadows. The room seemed filled with tiny whispering voices, or maybe it was just the stress starting to get to him. 

Whatever it was, it creeped him out. The shadows were beginning to take on spidery grasping hands.  He circled in the centre of the room, wondering whether he should make his way over to one of the walls so at least he'd have something solid at his back, but then he didn't want to find one of those shadows reaching out. He couldn't see the stone any more.

There was a tapping noise from the arch of deeper darkness that formed the front door. 

Seifer squinted, moved closer. 

Everything appeared to be still.

A few steps forward, as he skirted a large and rotting hole that had appeared in the floor. 

It took another few seconds of squinting to realise that there was something that shouldn't have been there lying along the frame of the door to the left. It looked like part of the ornate stone carving, or maybe a bundle of twigs, but what it really was beginning to look like was a hand.

_You're going crazy, Almasy. _

But then there was another tapping noise and a shadow, no, a figure, began to materialise up out of the darkness. It was abnormally thin, so thin that Seifer at first thought it was some kind of tree, silhouetted against the stone, an optical illusion, and its arms and legs seemed to be on wrong, all unfamiliar joints and angles. As he watched a blend of shapes flickered across its body, and he thought he saw the outline of a snarling wolf's head, with little chips of torchlight as eyes for a second before it solidified into a figure out of a tale or nightmare but unquestionably real. 

It didn't look any more human than it had done as the column of blue light.  The face was too long, almost horselike, the ears large, and the teeth, when it smiled, were sharp and pointed and too damn long.   It wore tattered clothes of some sort, androgynous in style and made out of tufts of fur and cloth and what looked like branches.  What skin showed between the tatterdemalion of rags and bones was brown as leather, and swirled with tattooes in blue paint that seemed to move in the torchlight.

It didn't look that threatening, but something made Seifer aware that this was Very Bad News.    

"Don't come any closer." Was that fear in his voice? 

The thing smiled and stretched out a hand. 

Seifer pressed the trigger and the bullet made a small dark hole somewhere in the centre of its forehead.
    
    The thing went over backwards with a soft _thud and lay still._
    
    It didn't move.
    
    Seifer walked up to it carefully, ready to carry out the Seifer Almasy Method of 'Is it dead yet?' which was to shoot it in the head again.  Worked with most things.
    
    He leaned down just as the thing whipped up an inhumanly-fast hand and caught him round the ankle with a force to crush bones. Seifer fell, slamming one arm out along the stone to break his fall, and hammered with his free boot at the thing's face, smashing teeth and bone with the dogged persistence of a Duracell Bunny. The hand loosened, but didn't let go. He kept kicking until the crater of its face was a messy ruin that would have stopped any normal opponent but it was still moving and then until he was almost exhausted and breath rasped in his throat. 
    
    Silence.
    
    The thing moved again with a spastic twitch but the grip still held and he watched as blood congealed and scabbed and bone reknitted. With a kind of eerie calm he placed the barrel of the gun against its wrist, and pulled the trigger, jerking his leg from the grip of the thing and limping the few yards to lean against the nearest wall. It was a few seconds before he looked down and realised the hand was still locked around his leg. 
    
    Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed thickly, reached down and began to force the fingers apart. Two of them broke with a noise like snapping twigs before he managed to lever the thing off and threw it across the room, where it rolled over and started to crawl back to its owner like a pale brown leather crab. As it reached the bare, high-arched feet the thing bent down and picked it up, stared at Seifer and aligned the hand with the stump of its wrist as nonchalantly as putting on a glove. There was a cracking noise as tendon and bone and blood vessels seemed to grow down from the wrist, writhing blindly before joining the stump.
    
    It was really, really disgusting, but like a train wreck, he couldn't take his eyes off it.
    
    The thing flexed its fingers with a crack and ran a finger around the line where hand and arm joined. The flesh sealed up behind it, flowing like water.   
    
    _Are you beginning to understand?_
    
     The voice was mocking.
    
      It would have made Seifer vomit, but as he hadn't actually eaten anything for the last forty eight hours, he contented himself with retching quietly in a corner.

Seifer liked people, if only as audiences, or targets, at least when he was winning, as the only thing that was worse to him than failing was failing with an audience. He'd managed to get round this at Garden by the simple tactic of not losing, but he had a gut feeling that that wouldn't work this time. Why, he didn't know, but there must have been a reason why the spirit had changed its form. 

And right now he was guessing that the ability to regenerate new body parts was a major factor, and unfortunately, not one that he shared.

 Seifer didn't lie to _himself, or at least not much, because self-delusion was weakness, and weakness meant you'd lose. And right now, he was going to die.  Of course, giving up usually meant you were going to lose, too. If you could convince your opponent you were going to win before you'd even fought the battle, it was yours already.  _
    
    Logic was not his friend.  
    
    Come to think of it, he didn't have many friends right now.
    
    But maybe it was better that way. Seifer had learned long ago that the only person you could really depend on was yourself. That didn't stop him from wishing Quistis of Raijin or Fuujin or hell, even that wet-behind-the-ears Galbadian cadet -what was his name now? were there to back him up.  He tried to tell himself he didn't need anyone else, Hyne dammit, but it was cold, dark and okay, maybe even a little spooky.  Although Seifer usually ate spooky for breakfast, the situation was making him as jumpy as a ferret on crack.  
    
    Adrenaline sang through his veins as he eyed the thing, nerves on a knife-edge.  It didn't seem to be making any sudden moves. In fact it was just standing there, relaxed, looselimbed and as graceless as a reanimated scarecrow. It seemed to be smiling, and its pointed teeth made the smile something less than charming, like a shark's right before it opened its mouth and took a big bite out of your legs. Normally it wouldn't have stood a chance, he must have been a good hundred pounds heavier than it, if about a foot shorter, and well armed.
    
    But then there was that smile.. 
    
    Seifer fought to keep his voice level, even managing a touch of the old familiar arrogance. "Come on, then. Show me what you got."
    
    If anything, the smile became a little bit wider.
    
    _You will lose. And you know it. Otherwise you would have attacked me by now. Are you afraid, boy?_
    
    "I'm not _afraid.  It's not over yet." _
    
    He thought how Quistis always said it was overconfidence that made him careless. Overconfidence, and, oh yeah, underestimating the enemy. Been there, done that. It would have been nice if he'd at least _known that he'd learned from his mistakes. _
    
    He thought how being a sorceress's knight and one of the most wanted men in the country gave him the right not to be called 'boy' ever again. He'd earned it. Boy, had he earned it.
    
    _ I could have made you famous_
    
    "Don't you mean 'infamous'? That's why I'm in this fucking mess in the first place."
    
    _"But this time"_ another smile "_you would have been on the winning side."_
    
     "Yeah, right. Like you're going to conquer the world from this shithole"   
    
    _But I would have let you live. Anyway, the time for bargains is over._
    
    "I've got one. How about _I don't kill __you, and you let me and her walk out of here. You can have the others." he added, feeling generous. Way to get rid of two problems at once.  Damn, he should have been a politician.  Now __that was a scary thought._
    
    _The time for bargains is over. You are dead._
    
    It was the way it said it that sent chills up Seifer's spine. He'd been threatened many times, in many different ways, but there was a calm certainty about the statement that said, yes, this is going to happen. Not _as good as, just, __you are. _
    
    His finger itched on the trigger. 
    
    He just had to get past it. That was what he kept telling himself, and Hyne, he almost convinced himself it would be easy.
    
    It wasn't.
    
    Seifer had his plan marked out in his head even before he moved.  He just had to disable it for long enough to get to the head and drop it on the floor, maybe stamp on it a few times.  Problem solved.
    
    The first part went just as planned. Often, the first person to get efficiently vicious was the last person left standing. The one thing Leonhart hadn't got, how to fight dirty
    
    He opened his mouth to reply,  "You think….." and as it cocked its head at him, listening in a vaguely birdlike manner, he feinted to the left, went round to the fight, and as it raised its arm to swipe at him-the thing had a helluva long reach, like some kind of monkey, and it almost got him- he raised his knife and grabbed the opposite shoulder. The knife sank up to the hilt under its left armpit and he twisted it a couple of times for good measure.
    
    This was the bit where the plan began to seriously differ from reality.
    
    In real life, the victim would have been killed instantly, Seifer's knife slashing through the left lung to the heart, hopefully cutting several major blood vessels on the way in.  It was a technique he'd used several times during his brief and unspectacular career of an assassin, no scream, as the guy was dead before he knew it, and very little blood.  Just a man sagging over quietly in a dark alleyway, another holding him up, smiling, explaining, too much drink, keeping to the shadows. Nothing suspicious about that, and it had worked any number of times.
    
    Okay, he hadn't been quite as stupid as to imagine it would kill the thing, but surely having most of your arteries severed would slow you down a bit.
    
    It didn't even flinch.  
    
    Another thing Quistis had once told him.  Never Assume Anything.
    
    Seifer had assumed the thing would stagger, fall, be thrown off balance long enough for him to get round it. Instead it grabbed him by the shoulder of his jacket and threw him into the opposite wall without even breaking a sweat. Thankfully its overlong, bony fingers skidded off the worn leather so it couldn't get a proper grip, otherwise he realised later the fall would probably have broken his neck, but as Seifer body-slammed the wall he really wasn't thinking about how damn lucky he was.  
    
    As he fell over, he saw the spirit moving up out of the corner of his eyes, pushed off the floor and was up, muscles working automatically past exhaustion or pain, before he actually thought about what he was doing.
    
    It tried to grab him again, arms flailing like a particularly deadly windmill, slicing the air.  Seifer tried hard not to look at the slash under its left arm. Body fluids dripped out sluggishly to stain the strange clothing down its side, and then stopped.  The blood wasn't red, and it didn't smell metallic and heavy and hot like human blood, but rather of wetness, dank corners in forests the sun never saw, the floor layered head-high in fermenting leaflitter, populated by strange pale bugs with no eyes and glowing radioactive bodies.
    
    Okay, time to try another tactic. This time he waited until it came closer and then tried a variation on his favourite Garden technique. Ducking beneath its guard, he slashed at it with his knife, spinning and cutting again and again until its stomach was a ragged patchwork of holes, all the delicate pipework of the human body torn to shreds as he ducked under its arms finally, slipping on bits of bloody tubing and feeling its clawing fingers grasping for his coat collar and hair. 
    
    It was possible that this method was even more stunningly unsuccessful than the first, One, because after Seifer ducked under its arm to go get the head he had no idea where the hell in the room he was, two, it seemed to slow it down about as much as his first attempt, (i.e, not at all) and three, because afterwards the thing just caught hold of his other arm, the one without a knife, by the little finger and used his own momentum to throw him across the room into another wall.
    
    The finger broke.
    
    It hurt a lot.
    
    After that Seifer just tried to stay the hell out of its way, and the fight was reduced to a near-silent game of dodgeball, feints and retreats and no sound at all except his breathing and the odd groan and curseword as it threw him into, over or onto various items of architecture.  
    
    Quistis dozed in a corner.  She'd finally managed to drift into a heavy half-doze some hours after Seifer had left, dreams slow and peopled by strange abstract figures that slipped through her fingers as soon as she tried to focus on them. Socks and mountains and pumpkins driving buses took on sudden vital importance for a few seconds before they faded away, merging into different though equally weird dreams or sudden freezing wakefulness.
    
    She'd always heard (mostly from non SeeDs) that the hard thing about battle was the waiting, but from her own experience she, personally, thought the worst part was when something or someone came running screaming at you and trying to bite your knees off or sink a bullet in your chest.
    
    That wasn't making the waiting any easier.
    
    There was a feeling of unease so strong she could almost taste it.  The Galbadians were handling it in their own way. Stren had a lighter, flicking it repetitively and irritatingly open and closed with an echoing _click.  The flame seemed to pass through his hands, dancing in Quistis' sleepy mind like an independent spirit.  It was a waste of fuel, of course, but she had a feeling that he knew this as well as her and it wasn't like they could light any kind of fire in a cell anyway. _
    
    Rahel had a dogeared and greasy pack of Triple Triad cards in her hands, playing Patience over and over with a kind of dogged intense determination. Quistis would have offered to join in, but there was something in the older woman's posture that indicated she'd very much like to be left alone, and she respected that.  
    
    Dom was cleaning his pistol with an oily rag. He had all the parts laid out in front of him, carefully set on the back of a plastic mapcase like some kind of street trader and was meticulously twisting the rag into a tiny point to reach every corner, eyes intent on his work.
    
    Quistis just sat and tried to sleep.  
    
    Her watch indicated it was now six thirty am. Back in Garden the day would just be starting, students lining up in the cafeteria for rolls and cereal and hot coffee.  
    
    Coffee.
    
    Right now if someone had handed her an empty mug, Quistis would have tried to lick the bottom. Her mouth felt dirty, dry, and she was cold. Too much blood in her caffeine system, Selphie had always teased in the mornings when she turned up like some kind of zombie, in sharp contrast to the Trabian girl whose hyperactivity, she had reluctantly come to assume, was all-natural.  She knew she should be thankful for small mercies. If Selphie had been here she would have been climbing the walls and driving Quistis crazy.    
    
    The walls.
    
    Quistis'gaze played idly over the wall above Dom's head. He was oblivious, immersed in his work, head bent. The wall looked somehow different.  For a minute she would have sworn that it flexed and distorted like a piece of rubber.  She rubbed her eyes, feeling the reassuring rough warmth of her fur gloves against her face
    
    It was official. 
    
    Quistis Trepe was going crazy without coffee.
    
    The second wave, when it came, caught her by surprise. The wall, in fact the whole cell, flexed and contracted like a stress ball as Dom dived for cover under a rucksack as pebbles and then large stones, blocklike squares it would have taken at least two of them to lift, crashed down to crack the floor slabs into pieces but miraculously faling to hit anybody.
    
    "Shit!"  
    
    That was Dom, from under the rucksack. The straps trailed round his head like oversized bunny ears, and Quistis had to fight an absurd urge to laugh as she covered her head with her arms.
    
    Rahel and Stren were both flattened against the wall.
    
    There was a grating noise from the structure.  The four SeeDs stared at each other, all thinking the same thing
    
    _It's going to go_.
    
    In unison they looked at the ceiling.  It creaked but held.
    
    There was a noise that sounded like someone inhaling and the whole cell changed. It didn't happen all at once, but more like a wave that crashed through the building, leaving the faint scent of leaflitter and mould.  A wave of darkness.  All the lights went out, leaving only sharp freezing blackness.
    
    Someone swore, softly but clearly, and they all tensed, expected more rockfalls, some kind of strange attack, something.
    
    There was a hushed silence. 
    
     Finally there was the click Quistis had been hearing for the last half-hour as Stren opened his lighter. The SeeDs huddled round it, trying not to stare at the tiny flame as their eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness.
    
    "Just what the fuck is going on?"  
    
    There was sudden thump from above their heads and dust and small pebbles rained down.
    
    "Whatever. Let's get out of here."
    
    "I don't _like_ this. It could be a trap"
    
    "Well everyone move unless you want to not bloody like it from under a big pile of rocks." She recognised Rahel's voice, last, but the others were male, indistinguishable, and she couldn't tell who had spoken.
    
    Quistis fumbled for the door. She could see a darker shape where it had been, hissed at Stren to cover the light, and drew her whip as she made her careful way towards it, stumbling over rocks until she reached the reached the opposite wall of the cell and traced her fingers along it, feeling dampness and what she swore was vegetation. 
    
    She waved a hand carefully. It found no resistance except air.
    
    "Is it open?" A hissed whisper from one of the other three, still grouped around the lighter like moths to a flame
    
    "It's not even _here_" 
    
    "You're joking"  
    
    "Do I look like I'm joking?" she snapped. Bad enough they were going to make her official pathfinder, now they had to question her too.
    
    "Dunno. Can't see. It's too dark."
    
    Quistis stepped out over the threshold. Her boots touched hard stone and then after two steps, sweeping her feet carefully in front of her and trying very very hard not to think about horror movies, she bumped into the door. It was twisted as if crushed by some giant hand. As she pulled off her gloves to touch it, Quistis realised that it was as rusted and overgrown as if it had been lying in the same place for _years._
    
    More voices from the cell behind her.
    
    "Where's she gone?"
    
    "Quistis?"
    
    _"Trepe?"_
    
    "I'm here.  It's all right. It's open.  We're out" Saying the last words filled her with relief.  
    
    The other SeeDs filed out into the corridor behind her, faces pale blurs in the darkness.
    
    Rahel groaned. "What the hell happened?"
    
    Looking around, Quistis could have asked the same question. The corridor was smaller than she remembered (and she'd sent a lot of time staring at it) and pockmarked with holes. The floor was strewn with vegetation that couldn't have grown in less than a few years, a tangled mat of green. It was muddy underfoot though the soil was hard and frozen, trickling in from holes gaping in the stone walls where the stones had fallen out.
    
    "Whatever way, it doesn't look too safe. Which way, Quistis?"
    
    Quistis didn't know how the hell they expected her to know, but it gave her at least some kind of authority. She pointed along the way Seifer had left and then lowered her arm as she realised they had no way of seeing her.
    
    "This way. To the left." Her voice rang oddly along the corridors, throwing her own words back to her. 
    
    There was a lot of echoey swearing as people stubbed toes on rocks and turned round facing the wrong way, until they moved out, Quistis in point, Stren on rearguard and the other two in between. 
    
    Quistis unhooked her whip from her belt, holding it loosely in her hand as she stepped over stone blocks, murmuring warnings to the men behind her. The floor seemed to slope, very gently, upwards.  
    
    They had travelled only a couple of hundred metres before she started to hear the sounds. Small noises, at first, sounding like panicked breathing, and slow scrapes along the ground, that gradually built up to an insane crescendo of noise, echoing oddly  from the stone walls. It was impossible to tell where they were coming from, what they were or even how far away, the tunnels functioning as a kind of amplifier with the sounds ricocheting off corners further ahead in the blackness. 
    
     Quistis held out a hand veiled in spiderwebs, thumping into Rahel's chest as the older woman took another step forwards. Someone else bumped into her back.
    
    She hissed "Stop." quietly, almost inaudibly, but the tunnels took it up and twisted it, giving it teeth, _stopstopstopstopstopstop_ rattling along into infinity and then fading suddenly into a drift of cold and empty silence.
    
    The noises from in front had finished, too. She could feel movements in the air from behind her as the Galbadians shifted silently, checking for enemies. 
    
    "Is anybody there?" This time it sounded normal, and she cursed whatever fluke of architecture had built the corridors.  
    
    There was a long pause.
    
    "Lupe?" Someone's voice from up above, young, nervous, tentative
    
    "Quistis Trepe, Balamb." She tried to put as much calming authority in her voice as she could. 
    
    A dark shape rounded the corner, carrying a twisted, improvised torch of paper that shed some light, through not much, on the proceedings.   The effect was slightly spoiled when it burned down to the figure's hand and went out abruptly as he sucked his fingers, swearing.
    
     "Damn."
    
    _damndamndamndamn_. The noise rumbled through the corridors, ending with another indistinct _thump from the ceiling.  More pebbles showered down, hard rain._
    
    Rahel raised her voice, shouting through the noise.
    
    "Who is it.?"
    
    "Isak!" The figure got close. "Don't shoot!"
    
    "You're okay?" She could see the outline of untidy black hair now, if she looked hard.
    
    "Quistis?" He sounded unreasonably relieved to have found her.
    
    Rahel coughed. "Do you know what the hell just went down?"
    
    Isak swung his head to her, looking startled.
    
    "It's okay.  It's Rahel, Stren, Dom. Got any ideas?  We were just sitting there and it went all tits-up."
    
    Dom and Stren chimed in with muted 'hey' s from behind her.
    
    Isak waved to them, the movement almost invisible in the dark, and turned his head back towards Quistis. She could see the glitter of his glasses.
    
     "Uh, well, I saw Seifer a while back, and he said he was going to go fight it. That was a while back." He shrugged.  "Haven't seen him since. Maybe that's got something to do with it."
    
     "Almasy's brainwashed. Joined the Dark side." Rahel cut in, her speech military-crisp and sharp as a knife.
    
    Isak's gaze flicked between them, umpire in this game of verbal tennis. 
    
    Quistis reluctantly nodded. _Oh yes, he's just so damn evil he managed to collapse the castle around us just by concentrating really hard.._
    
    He looked supremely puzzled, and his next question made her freeze. 
    
    "Didn't you see Seifer? He said he was coming to find you."
    
    Quistis thought better of mentioning their earlier encounter. "Haven't seen him. Why?"
    
    Isak shrugged again. "Dunno. He didn't _sound_ brainwashed." But this time his voice sounded doubtful.
    
    Quistis privately thought that, as Seifer was an arrogant violent annoying jerk whether brainwashed or not, it was sometimes hard to tell.  She could just see herself trying to explain it to the Galbadians.
    
    _So how did you know he wasn't being controlled and just faking it?_
    
    _Well, he swore more….._
    
    A third shower of pebbles cascaded from the ceiling.
    
    "Look, we better get out of here."  She turned to Isak.  "Seen any stairs?"
    
    She could hear the rustle of his clothing as he moved. "Just back here. I was going to go up, and then I heard you, so I thought I'd go investigate."
    
    Quistis shot him an assessing look.  "Why does everyone run in the direction of the menacing sound?"
    
    "Curiosity." He started off. "And night vision goggles."
    
     Of course.  He'd been on night watch. She was beginning to think that there was more to Isak than a messy haircut and the survival instincts of a sardine.  
    
    The stairs, when they found them, were almost suicidally narrow, with deep U shaped steps. Quistis went first, arranging Stren at the back as before. She shivered in the blast of cold air that drifted down from the rooms above, fighting with drifts of watery damp scent from below. Steps rocked under her feet, crumbling mortar and chips of stone as she walked. 
    
    This place was crazy.  Like some kind of fairground funhouse, though of course without the fun and with special extra servings of piping hot death. 
    
    Oh well. She was a SeeD, peril was her job, and she enjoyed it, laughing in the face of danger and all that, but Quistis couldn't help thinking that maybe she should have taken that desk job after all. 
    
    There was a strange scraping noise from the floors above. She froze for a second and then continued up the staircase, all five of them ascending in a quick careful silence. Wind whipped at her hair and pushed the hood of her parka down.  Water dripped on her face, freezing and icy. They climbed more steps in a tight spiral and after passing a couple more empty floors she heard voices again, calling out of the darkness.
    
    "Anybody there?" 
    
    This time it was only more SeeDs, about fifteen in number and not much older, ragged and bedraggled.  All of them seemed rather touchingly grateful to have found someone who could tell them what to do, and Quistis wondered just what the Galbadians were thinking, allowing kids out on such an important mission.  But then, they hadn't been any older in the Sorceresses Wars. 
    
    How time flew.  She was, what, all of twenty now?

Quistis felt a lot older. 

She kept climbing, calves beginning to burn after so many hours inactivity. Noises drifted down from the rooms above her, scufflings and some kind of muffled thuds. She hissed down the staircase for quiet. Thank Hyne for faked authority.  

At least the weird echoing effects had stopped. Their voices seemed to be muffled in velvet, swallowed up by the great curtain of noiselessness that had descended on the rooms like very expensive soundproofing.  

There it was again.

Quistis motioned to the soldiers behind her to stay still and crept up the last three steps herself, whip at the ready.  If whatever was there was in the stairwell, it probably wouldn't do any good, but it made her feel better. One of the major limitations of a whip, sure, they were versatile, and people didn't take them seriously, but you really, really, needed room to use them in.

She mentally ran through the words of magic in her head, but felt nothing except the answering keyed-up rush of adrenaline, sparking for one single second, and then fizzling out like a firework in the rain. 

Still no magic, then.  Its loss felt like a black hole in her mind.

Figured. She was in a black mood. And she had a headache, no magic, yadda yadda. In fact, most of the items on her equipment list seemed to be preceded by 'no' No magic, no backup she could trust, no information, no- well, almost no- light. 

No luck.

What did the SeeD manual advise in situations like this?

 She continued up the stairwell, one hand scuffing along the centre wall. Easy. Don't get into this kind of fight.  But she couldn't _not_ get into it. Quistis Trepe never turned her back on a fight. That would be failing and failing was one of the few things she did not tolerate. As well as cold coffee, Seifer and small pink fluffy toys. She was a winner. 

Didn't feel particularly winner-like at the moment though. Success?  _Please_. Life sucked.

The noises grew louder and her steps slower as the light got slightly brighter. It flickered, oddly, throwing the steps into uncertain sharp relief.  Quistis stumbled, threw an arm out to catch herself and then stopped where she was, awkwardly balanced on the stairs, one foot up and one down, with her head resting on the elbow of her outflung arm. The noises continued. She craned her neck, seeing moving blurs.

It was Seifer. He was fighting, which didn't really surprise her, but with none of his usually effectively vicious grace, more like a dogged determination. 

What he was fighting did surprise her. It looked nothing like the blue light, or him, or like the soldier. Rather it resembled nothing more than an animated bundle of twigs, some inhumanly elongated figure that was hardly visible in the flickering light.

Quistis cautiously stepped out into the room, sliding her feet carefully along the flat stones until she heard footsteps from behind her and turned, lightly and silently, hoping that it was just some Galbadians that had decided to catch her up.  She could deal with people questioning her authority. She'd had enough practice.  

There was a pointed hiss from the shadows of the stairwell.

_"What in Hyne's name is going on?"_

The thing Seifer was fighting's head's snapped round, like a hunting hawk as it focused. Seifer managed to get in a sweeping slash to its chest before it delivered a blow to his face that sent him reeling.

Quistis jumped back as he hit the wall beside the door, dislodging several pieces of masonry, and fell over with a crash. She poked him cautiously with the toe of her army boot. Seifer mumbled something that sounded very much like "stand up straight when I'm trying to…hit you" and then his eyes opened. People pushed past from behind as she moved into the room.

"Are you all right?" 

Spot the Sandman reference..(I drove a bus)

Everyone will have worked out by now that the picture thing has kind of dried up. This is due to my sister, who's the artist ( in case you haven't figured that by now due to her talent for shameless self-promotion) having lots of work to. Basically it was a choice between waiting for the art or going ahead and posting, and the writing won. There will, however, be a pic to celebrate 100 reviews (if I get that far) but looks like that'll be it, apart from maybe title art for anything else I do.  There is also a possibility of a couple of collaborations (me writing, her drawing), check for info.

 Have sucky holiday job, but on the plus side more time to write as in only 8 to 5 with no homework. Am hoping to finish GB by the time I go on holiday in September and have a short break before I start posting my next project.  Next time you use a piece of ribbon, of for that matter anything you didn't make yourself, think of the poor schmo who had to cut/paint/pack/weigh that for you.  Yes, even the keyboard. Someone had to put that together, you know.  And I bet they got paid minimum wage.  And no, they didn't enjoy it.

And to (in alphabetical order)

Breaker-one (yeah, all ff8 charas are kind of a blank page as far as resolutions is concerned, although there's lots of fanon conventions, which makes it fun. Some stuff, it ends so ..completely, fanfics are made kind of unnecessary, ie Spirited Away, which I did think about.) CelesteSpring(*sings Billy Joels' angry Young Man at her*Haven't got ff7, but Reno looks..interesting. Mmm. Maybe, ebay permitting.) Dalpal (hehe, your comment gave me the idea for this chapter song) Dust Traveller (the swearing's sins of the fathers. I have to do something about it, otherwise in RL later I'll be all 'Your dog's totally fucked. Shit, shouldn't have said that.' And then they'll sue me.) KRP, (thanks) Quistis88, (also thanks, loffable d00d), seventh (Rinoa is not a strong, confident woman, Quistis, on the other hand….) and superviolinist (so is he)

Wow, I'm amazed how many good writers took the time to r & r. :o

kate (I'm going down to Hollywood, they're going to make a movie 'bout the things they find crawling round my brain)


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Despite the thing about pix last update, the chapter pictures for nine and eight (I think) should now be up at  and respectively

Also to celebrate 100 reviews, (you nice people) there's a small cartoon and a GB drinking game up at If it's not up it will be very soon.

Thank you all.  

God has smiled upon you this day, the fate of a nation in your hands,

And blessed be the children we, who fight with all our bravery,

Till only the righteous stand.

You see the distant flames, they billow in the night.

You fight in all our names, for what you know is right.

And when you all get shot, and cannot carry on,

Though you die, la resistance lives on

South Park medley: La Resistance

Only the good die young.

-Billy Joel

Seifer looked up and saw her.

 "No, I'm just lying on the floor because I like the pattern of the carpet." He fought hard to keep the relief out of his voice, and almost succeeded.

 "There isn't a carpet."  she snapped back. Seifer was pretty sure that the hard crisp words were hiding fear that would have had any sensible person running for cover, but as always Quistis' voice was cool and controlled.

That was SARCASM, dammit." He levered himself up onto his elbow, probing at a loose tooth and tasting blood in his mouth like warm salty metal.

 "Having fun?" She raised an eyebrow, and if she hadn't practised that look in the mirror there was no justice in the world.

 "Yeah, great.  I'm thinking maybe next I'll peel off all my skin with a nail file." 

"Nail file'd never work. Can't really get a good edge on--" 

"Sure. You just do it with your tongue." The sniping was, in a strange way, reassuring. Seifer would have been really worried if, Hyne help him, she was _polite_.

A second voice broke in. "What _exactly is going on here?' The voice was male, calm and collected, and altogether too much in control. Seifer hated it instantly.  There was a loaded pause until he realised that the man was talking to him. _

_Asshole._

 He ignored him, returning to the task of peeling himself off the floor. A boot poked him in the ribs. 

"I said-"

Seifer turned and spat blood all over the man's feet, followed by the tooth, which made a little 'ping' as it hit the leather and bounced off.  There was a pause, during which he picked himself up, looked down at his clothes and decided to not bother brushing himself off. "What do you fucking think?" He thought about lighting a last cigarette, because violence was always enhanced by nicotine, but decided to leave his hands free just in case.

Quistis moved to his side

"You okay?"

"Does it matter?"

"No." 

"Then I'm fine."

"_Excuse_ me?" The Galbadian soldier grabbed Quistis' arm, eyebrows raised.

 Seifer snarled "Don't you think we ought to kill the fucking thing?"

 Hyne, what was _with this guy? Damn, he'd thought Leonhart was bad. The stick up this guy's ass had a stick up its ass, apparently._

Behind him there was a sudden sharp scream as two of the more impetuous remaining cadets discovered that bullet holes left in the wraith healed slowly with a noise like sucking mercury.

Someone tugged at the soldier's sleeve. There was a brief whispered conversation, of which Seifer caught snatches of ..'well, we can always kill him _after_."  He allowed himself a slight grin. Never though he'd be so glad to have nothing to lose.

_..apart from your head and hands and legs and hell, most of your internal organs…_

There was a brief pause until_ Mr. Uniform nodded curtly and snapped off a slight salute. A __salute, for Hyne's sake. _

Quistis shot him a 'can you believe this guy' look, rolling her eyes, and suddenly Seifer felt very old, despite the fact he was probably a couple more years younger at the most. He slipped an arm round her shoulders, more to stop himself falling over than anything else, and felt her hand go to her whip in a move too casual not to be habit.

"I am prepared to die as a soldier."

"Really? I'm just going to shoot everything I see." He gave an evil grin. The soldier stepped back, almost imperceptibly. "Apart from bullets don't work on this thing. Hell, be my guest. Go mad.  Works for me"

Quistis touched him on the arm.  The firelight gleamed off her glasses.

"What happened?"

"When?"

"You know. It had you." She paused. "How did you get _out?"_

"It told me to take you to it.  "He swallowed and it seemed suddenly loud. "So it could..eat you. I don't know. Nothing good.  And it all kind of meshed with the Rinoa thing. I just…..couldn't.  Not again. Not this time."

The slightly awkward silence was broken by another scream. Both the Balamb cadets' heads turned towards the sound automatically.

 Seifer pulled Quistis forwards.

"We need to fight it. Behind it, there's some kind of head. That's where it keeps the magical shit. You break it, it bought it. You can't kill it normally. We have to get round it."

She started to reply, but he interrupted anyway. "Tell people. Otherwise we've got no chance." They were shouting by now, as the first group of soldiers engaged the spirit and the air turned thick with gunfire and shouts, choked orders and screams.

"There's always a way"

"There's always a way and it usually doesn't work.  Just because it's lying on the ground and bleeding doesn't mean it's not armed and dangerous." He touched his scar, briefly. "Watch."

"Why didn't it kill you?

"Hyne knows. It was just playing. It thought it was funny. It knew I couldn't touch it Now it's _really fighting." He coughed._

Quistis glanced over at the spirit. It was a sharpedged blur of motion, torchlight glittering off its long teeth and burning demonically in the dark pits of its eyes. People were dying. Some of the Galbadian soldiers who'd pushed past her and Seifer on the steps were lying in little tangled heaps around the edge if its reach. A few hung back, staring at anything and everything, Seifer, Quistis, the spirit. She grabbed one of them by the arm. 

"Listen. You've got to get behind it. There's some kind of stone, and it's using that to get its power from. Otherwise we can't kill it." He nodded, and tapped someone else, shouting to them, and the words spread through the ragged group like a game of whispers, spreading out as people drew back to regroup and refuel and others jumped into the fight to take their places. 

It didn't look good. In the time they'd snatched to stand talking, the room had seemed half –full of people, and now the ranks were already thinning. It should have been easy, the spirit hopelessly outnumbered, but the tactics learned in Galbadia weren't working with an opponent who was to all intents and purposes invulnerable. Too many people had looked up from what should have been a killing blow to see a hand holding a stolen knife sink itself to the hilt in their chest or a set of grinning razor teeth rip out their throat in haze of blood and thin saliva. Even now everyone knew what they were looking for, the spirit's position, pressed against the wall with its back to the stone head, made it suicide for anyone to get past to try and destroy it and impossible to surround.

Quistis squeezed Seifer's shoulder and ran into the fray, pushing her glasses up on her nose as she left and already shouting orders, trying to get the soldiers arranged into some kind of fighting group. Seifer leant back against the wall to catch his breath and surreptitiously check for any broken bones. He curled a hand round his ribs. Nope, seemed okay. From experience he knew he'd be okay in a couple of days with some rest, and maybe some aspirin, but it was a fact that he wasn't going to get either hanging around here. 

One of the cadets gave him a hard glance. There were other scowls behind his back, sharp surreptitious whispers in between the minute's R&R.  

He sighed. "Yeah, okay, I'm going, I'm going." and followed Quistis over to the spirit, muttering "Assholes" quietly as he went. Seifer could imagine what they were saying.

Trouble. 

Traitor. Dangerous.  Useless bastard.

 Well, screw _them. His burning anger made him forget the weariness for a few seconds as he wished them all on the island closest to Hell. It almost made him forget how glad he'd been to see them._

Sons of _bitches_.

Seifer's train of thought was temporarily derailed as a body-it was definitely a body, people usually came in less pieces-crashed onto the floor beside him. The corpse had a long sword in one limp hand that he snatched up, gauging the distance to the spirit. It was a new model, which surprised him, and the grips felt heavy and good in his hands, the length and weight of the weapon close to what he was used to.

Well miracles did happen. He was _this close to several armed Galbadians and they weren't trying to kill him.  Yet. _

Seifer grinned sharply and joined the fight, pushing to the front as a couple of the Galbadians drew back to regroup. The growing anger in him filled the place that should have been occupied by fear. Anger at being tired and cold and having to fight when for once in his life it was the last thing he wanted to be doing. Anger at screwing it all up-again.  

Anger filled him to the point where it blotted out all other feelings, and he welcomed it because it was easier not to think.  Flashes of images came like strobe lighting, speeding up in fast flickering flashes one second and then next slowing so everything spun through the air like treacle, liquid and smooth.  

Quistis was still up and fighting, though she was moving awkwardly, favouring one leg. She screamed orders in a cracked hoarse voice, trying to group the scared, weary cadets into some kind of formation as she dodged and spun in a lethal and vicious dance. 

Save the Queen wove an intricate web of slashes round the spirit's head.  It wasn't doing much serious damage, but it seemed to be slowing the monster, irritating it in the same was a cloud of biting flies would haze a T-Rexaur.    

_She's the only thing keeping them together._

 Seifer felt a fierce flash of approval, even pride. Let Cid say that she didn't deserve her instructor's licence now.  She'd probably kick _his_ butt, too.

He moved up to her shoulder and shouted.  "What's your tactic?" 

She gestured with a crisp arm movement that would have looked a lot more professional if the hand in question hadn't been wearing a mitten. "Help me cover." 

Seifer nodded to show that he understood and she shot him a grateful grin.

Taking orders from Quistis Trepe.  He must be going soft, and more worryingly, that was only one short step away from liking it.

Aa, well, first time for everything. 

Quistis stepped in close then ducked, sliding to the right to deftly avoid the swing of a Galbadian's blade that would have taken her head off.  The cadet in question was less lucky, the sword passed through the creature's arm without stopping and the thing bent its head down to delicately take the Galbadian's head in its jaws. Seifer shouted and grabbed the man's collar to try and drag him away.

It bit down as if it was crunching the top off an ice lolly.

_Crack._

The jaws locked shut an inch away from Seifer's hand drooling saliva and blood. He swore and wrenched it back as the spirit gave a snap of its head that whipped the corpse into a couple of younger soldiers.

Damn thing fought like a T-Rexaur.  

It bent as if hinged at the waist and grabbed the ankle of one of the fallen men, hoisting him high in the air. Seifer had to rethink as a couple of pigtails fell out of the helmet. Her. Okay..

 Quistis wrapped her whip round its neck but the thing still kept its back pressed against the wall, covering the head, while menacing the soldier with both of its free hands and all of its teeth. 

The soldier, predictable and as befitted cannon-fodder, had dropped her weapon. Seifer stared into wide eyes, giving the cadet a couple of bonus points at least for not screaming. 

Quistis jerked back on the whip and shouted "_Now!" and he brought the sword down in a wide arc that slashed neatly as a bacon-slicer through the spirit's arm and impacted on the floor, screaming sparks._

Two things happened.

The sword clanked off the stones and broke. Seifer swore. Crappy foreign imports.

The soldier fell all of three inches before the spirit, apparently ignoring both Quistis and Seifer and the laws of all natural science, which dictated it should at least be feeling some pain, caught the stump with its free hand.  Tendons stood out along its arm.

_Crunch._

The numbers of live people were getting ever smaller. This should have slightly worried Seifer, but he was too busy staying alive. 

And it was taking some doing.

He realised with a shock that there were no people hanging round the edges of the room, no one resting any more except in peace, or in pieces. A quick head count revealed only a handful still standing, maybe six or seven not including him and Quistis.

Fuck. 

The spirit aligned the stump of its arm with the dangling hand and snarled as the tendons and veins and nerves began to squirm like obscene pale worms, feeling blindly for the wrist.

Quistis snarled "Oh no, you don't." and grabbed the hand by its clawed thumb. Brass rings pierced the web of flesh between thumb and index finger in barbaric splendour. They gleamed in the firelight as Quistis snatched the hand away from the questing stump of the spirit's arm. It gave a ripping _zzziip as she pulled it away, the tendons lengthening to half a metre or more and resolutely refusing to snap._

The movement threw Quistis off balance, pivoting to stay standing with the fingers snapping at her face. 

But her twist yanked the creature a half-step or two away from the wall, revealing the black crumbling niche at its back. 

Quistis shouted triumphantly and threw all her weight into the hold. Seifer moved into attack from the left while a couple of the smaller Galbadian cadets moved in. 

Was that worry on the creature's face? 

The light glinted off its suddenly fearful eyes and off the small grey oval ball which came hurtling towards them from the back of the room.

For a minute it seemed as if everyone was frozen in place, eyes tracing the descending arc of the grenade as it swooped towards the spirit. It gave a jerk of its whole body like a dog shaking off water, tilted its head in a birdlike gesture, and then caught the missile neatly in its mouth with a soft _clink_ as the metal glanced off hard fangs.

"What the fuck.."

"Who was that?.".

_"Duck!"_

"Where?"

 "It's going to.."

Quistis let go of the creature's wrist and the hand pinged back towards its owner like a mitten on an elastic string.  It bounced off the spirit's ragged chest just as it flicked its head sideways. The movement spun through its whole upper body as if the decaying creature was a champion shot-putter. The shot, in this case, was the grenade flying like a boomerang straight back towards its owner, who was no doubt wetting their pants and praying to Hyne.

Bad luck.

All the SeeDs dived for cover like frightened and sensible rabbits.

Seifer thought he caught a glimpse of the soles of Quistis' furry boots disappearing behind a pile of rubble before he jumped in the other direction. His elbow connected with someone else's nose just before his knees connected with the floor. He slammed his hands over his ears.

The explosion felt like a physical force. He felt the building rock around him, floor spasming like a dying animal and showering fragments of smashed rotting ceiling.  Long moments passed during which Seifer really got to grips (again)with the realities of being turned into a human pizza before he uncurled his arms from over his head and ears and realised that maybe he wasn't going to die this time, either.

It was very quiet. 

There was a groan. A shock of familiar messy hair poked up from behind a slab, followed by a face, still streaming blood from its nose.

_"Isak?" _His voice sounded oddly loud in the muted dusty noises.  The whole building creaked like a storm-stressed ship in heavy seas and deep trouble. Other voices.__

"Seifer?"

Great. A whole room of dead people and he had to bump into the one person who still talked. 

 "Save the reunion." He glanced round, temporarily disorientated and hoping for a second that maybe the thing was against all odds, now dead.

No luck. He could make out a spidery silhouette, still crouched with its back to the wall like some kind of preying mantis.  It hissed.

Seifer sighed and swore, a soft stream of every Balamb curseword he could think of and then several foreign ones. It took some time until he finished off with "..and fuck your mother."

to find Isak staring like he'd been hit on the head.  Which come to think of it, he probably had. Guy'd looked spaced out at the best of times. But he still had his pistol at his hip, and dammit, wasn't he some kind of marksman? Like that Galbadian who'd taken a shot at Edea in the procession? They must be good for something-one thing was for sure, they pretty well sucked at motorcycle stunts.

Why wasn't anything ever easy? 

He coughed and spat, trying to get some of the dust out of his mouth.  Nothing else moved in the half dark. The fires had gone out in the smothering fall of debris, everything painted in several shades of grey. 

"Did you hear what we're trying to get at?" He waited as Isak shook his head and then continued. "It's got..like a soul. In a kind of statue.  You're a sharpshooter. Could you shoot it?"

Isak's round, earnest face squinted, possibly weighing up the disadvantages of _not _being a sharpshooter at this precise moment. "Where?."

Seifer pointed. "Behind it." He narrowed his eyes, waiting impatiently for the spirit to move and then caught a quick glimpse of the top of the head behind a blur of flying rags and limbs. It was easy to see, if you knew what you were looking for, the little flecks of glittery stone made the head shine oddly even in the dim light.

"There.  Try not to hit anyone." He thought for a second.  "Not that I care, but fuck, there's hardly anyone left." 

Isak nodded, uncharacteristically silent. He sighted and aimed, resting his arm nonchalantly on the back of a body, frayed cuffs trailing down to soak with blood and bile. Seifer wondered morbidly if he'd really noticed and if he hadn't what he'd do when he found out.  Probably nothing, in a combat situation there wasn't any time for sentiment, but this was Isak after all. He waited for the shot, crossing everything that could be crossed.

There was an abortive click. Lady Luck must have decided to take the night off. Typical damn woman. 

It was followed by a curseword from Isak "Damn thing jammed." He scraped futilely at the barrel. 
    
    "You're a soldier. If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway."
    
    _"There's someone who doesn't have to pay for spare par ..oh shit.."_
    
    The two men both dived in opposite directions as a falling body scattered the rocks they'd been sheltering behind.  Seifer circled and grabbed Isak as the other soldier made to go back and check the body.  "Get out of there!  Hyne, I'm surprised you lived past five. No survival instinct. At all. He's dead. You're not yet.  Forget it"
    
    "She." Isak looked stricken.
    
    "Doesn't matter. Still dead.  Look, I'll keep it busy and you go pick that thing up and drop it on the floor.  And then Game Over, Insert fucking Coin."
    
     "But we haven't got any weapons." Isak groaned and glanced round at the room, which was beginning to be decorated in an interesting new theme known as SeeD Parts Scattered All Over.
    
    Parts of it were on fire, other bits were falling apart, and the numbers of people left standing were beginning to look decidedly thin on the ground.
    
    "That won't matter." Seifer pointed to where the thing was grappling with one of the few remaining soldiers, back pressed resolutely to the niche holding the statue.
    
    He thought that they had no imagination. If it had been him, with no reason to fight except a crappy plastic medal and a pay packet, he would have headed for the hills five paragraphs ago.
    
     "It knows we can't leave, so we've got to go to it, but there's only one of it. We can do this." He swallowed and hoped that the younger SeeD would believe him. Realistically, of course, they hadn't got a hope in hell. Seifer was never one for motivational speeches, but even he knew that shrugging and saying" Let's go get torn to pieces" wasn't exactly going to make anyone leap to their feet and agree.
    
    Isak took the hook, swallowed. "Okay."
    
    "Go.  _Now." _
    
    They advanced together. Seifer frantically scanned the room for Quistis, kicking someone's leg out of the way. She wasn't there.
    
    The thing swung round from throwing someone else into a wall and the part of his brain that always noticed stupid things at times like this noted, damn, it hasn't got many more holes in. The spirit stretched out its arms, the hands contorted into claws, with, yes, very damn long nails, and hissed, baring long yellow teeth.
    
    It looked like it was beckoning. Seifer grasped for a thread of his old confidence, trying to make himself believe that this was going to work. 
    
    He moved forwards to confront it, ducked as the claws shot over his head and then body-slammed it, grabbing it by the shoulders and trying to knock it off balance, just for  a second.  Flesh slid unpleasantly under his hands as he fought for a grip.  
    
    "Isak!"
    
    Isak gulped-Seifer swore he could hear it from where he was-and darted out from behind him, hands outstretched to grab the head. The spirit snarled like an angry dog, lips curling to show more teeth than anything normal ought to have, and threw Seifer to the side. For a moment Seifer thought Isak would make it anyway, but then the thing bent, grabbed the Galbadian soldier by the leg and hauled him back, boots scraping on the stone. His fingers clawed at the edge of the alcove. 
    
    Not far enough. Pity. Everything seemed like it was happening very far away Isak spun and slammed an elbow into its chest and the spirit reached out, grabbed him by his ragged shirt collar, backhanded him casually a few times across the face and kicked him aside.  He didn't move again.
    
    Seifer swore and peeled himself up off the floor, slowly and in stages, crawling to his knees and grabbing the wall to help pull himself up.  His ribs ached, and he curled a hand round them, his breath steaming in the air, and staring at the creature as it turned round from Isak, slowly. How did he get stuck having to do the right thing? Too dumb to just walk away, he guessed.  Just his luck to have it all end like this, and the worse thing was, no one was ever going to know. Fucking pointless.
    
    It smiled, and the smile freaked Seifer out even more than its snarls. Things with mouths like steak knives weren't meant to grin. Stains that looked like old rust caked them thickly.
    
    _You lose._
    
    And the answering unspoken words in his head were, _I know._
    
     Seifer always played to win.  Coming second was just a nice way of saying that you'd lost, and often, coming second in a real fight meant you wouldn't be fighting again, or doing anything else again except maybe sucking your meals through a straw. So he'd learned to use the first thing that came to hand, flinging curses and taunts, gravel, chairs, and on one very blurred and half drunk evening, someone's artificial leg. 
    
    He groped in his pocket for something to use as it moved closer and his fingers found a last knife, tucked in the lining. He had time for one brief and vicious slash across the face as it advanced and saw the white of bone for a second before sheeting blood covered it and the spirit grabbed the knife by the blade, snapping it in half with a sharp metal _ping and throwing it over its shoulder. There was a brief scream from the room behind it.  _
    
    It slammed him to the wall at the side of the niche, and he felt the grating of stone behind his back as dust cascaded from the crumbled stones. Seifer stretched his hand to the side, fingers scrabbling at the broken stone at the edge of the alcove. Pebbles slid to the floor. Couldn't reach. 
    
    Shit.
    
    The dust made him cough and then just breathing became very important as the thing grabbed him round the throat and lifted him a good half-foot off the floor. This was crazy. It shouldn't even be able to hold him still, it had muscles like string beans.  He kicked it viciously between the legs. Nothing. 
    
    Couldn't breathe. 
    
    Seifer gave up trying to get at the rock and started trying to wrench its hands from around his neck. There was a soft slurp as the wound he'd left on the thing's face started to close over, sealing up like a jacket zipper to leave unmarked flesh behind it.  The room was very quiet behind him. He hoped Quistis was all right, even though the odds were that she wasn't. He kicked it again, black spots starting to dance at the edge of his vision. The room spun sickeningly. It dug its fingers harder into the side of his neck and he could feel his eyes rolling up.
    
    Fuck…
    
     Seifer tried to kick again, not sure if he connected or not because at this point he really couldn't feel his feet, but no one was going to say that he didn't fight till the bitter end…
    
    It let him go.
    
    In the fragment of a second before he hit the floor he saw a blur of blond hair and parka trim and realised that it was Quistis. By the time he looked up and his neck felt at least kind of normal she had her whip around its throat and seemed to be trying to unscrew its head. There was a long knife at her hip, already sticky with blood and hair. Seifer reached out a hand for it, and Quistis nearly took his head off with a kick before she realised it was him and pulled it in mid-air.
    
    "Sorry" Her face was red from the effort, but she at least seemed to be causing the spirit some pain, or at least had it jerked up on its toes. The knife came unsheathed with a metallic _swish and he stabbed it through the garment that covered its body, pulled it out with a sucking noise and sunk it up to the hilt again, leaning all of his weight onto the blade and ripping down until the tip got caught in a rib. Blood oozed from he cuts, and then stopped. He tugged at the knife, the hilt wet and slick in his hands._
    
    Just a bloody way of wasting time. 
    
    Seifer jerked his head at Quistis, towards the niche. About level with his expectations, none of the Galbadians had materialised out of nowhere to save the day and destroy the statue, possibly due to the fact that most of them were lying in small pieces around the room.
    
    She grinned, teeth white in a face dark with bruising and blood. Her glasses hung wildly skewed on her nose. Seifer mouthed "let go" It hurt to talk. She shook her head. 
    
    "Stupid bitch. The head…" 
    
    His throat felt like it had been sandpapered. 
    
    His hand dived into his pockets again and touched something smooth and round.
    
    A cherry bomb. Funny.  He'd thought that they'd all fallen out of his pockets when they'd been running through the forest.
    
    Maybe luck _was on his side for once. _
    
    Seifer threw it sideways, towards the statue instead of at the thing, and then as he saw it sparkle darkly in the air he realised that it wasn't any kind of fucking bomb, it was the damn transmitter. 
    
    Should have realised that the only kind of luck he got at the moment was the bad kind.
    
    Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. The thing slammed an elbow back into Quistis' face and he saw her reel backwards. A swipe from a clawed hand finished what the elbow had started, throwing Quistis down.  Her face looked so surprised. That was mainly what he remembered later, surprise and shock and dust, empty screams and the thud of falling bodies, just another set of images to add to the montage of violence that woke him in the early hours. 
    
     Time started moving again as Quistis hit the floor behind him and there was a kind of sickening _crack he'd heard too many times already, his brain shouting __NO! and at the same time realising whatever he did it wasn't going to make a blind bit of difference because they were all fucked anyway. _
    
    And right then was when the roof fell in.
    
    It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye…while beta reading this my sister's crits included "too much grues, not enough omm" and "a higher body count than Hot Shots Part 2."But I think it works-maybe a bit short and non-plotty-it was the end of chapter thirteen, but it just got too darn long so I had to split it.  Anyway, hope you liked it.

Many thanks to Dust Traveller for giving me lots of military stuff and assassination techniques, they were much appreciated. Long time no see, d00d. 

And, to (in alphabetical order)

Altol ( and new F &I nice surprise! But why are they in the broom cupboard?) anime-diva(haven't I seen you on the SF message board?) breaker-one (ferrets on crack seem to be a favourite) caroline( for everything, including early-morning karaoke-and see the walking wounded and the living DEAD!LALA) CelesteSpring (next projects, in order, are 1/ South Down The Coast-romance flavoured GB sequel 2/edit GB and pimp it round sites 3/fanfiction for sister's online comic Blackthorn 4/ write webcomic The Blue Cat Club with sister's art) Dalpal( kissies, well, they're coming, but it might take a while)iina lakso (yes, I will join, just give me time) Imuthis (swearing most certainly does..suit _you_, sir) Jindy Wahr (way with words-I like:D) pyro girl (the html shld be sorted) Tanya (ta)seatbelts(d00d, I love you guys.)superviolinist (like I said, html sorted now) and last but not least Verdanni De La Rosa.

Phew. 
    
    I got a couple of reviews this time saying that the fic's confusing. And then I printed it out and read it all through, and it is, at least at the end. So here's a quick summary of what's gone on so far, just in case you've lost the plot.  

Seifer comes out of time compression and finds work as an assassin in an urban slum until a crop of wanted posters appear with his face on them. Realising that he's wanted by both Martine and Cid, he starts running and is caught by an ex-Seed somewhere in the snowbound Trabian woods, Quistis is sent to take him back to Balamb Garden for trial or exoneration, and given a sensor linked to her vital signs that allows her to

track his movements and cause acute pain when she feels like it. On the way to the ship they run into a party of Galbadian soldiers.

And this is when it starts getting complicated. 

Basically the thing they have to fight is a kind of spirit of place that for reasons unknown keeps its soul, whatever (think Yura and her comb in Inuyasha) in a carved stone head bricked up in a wall (source, well, lots of Celtic myths are based round heads- Bran in the Mabinogion, and a couple of old English houses have skulls or weird stones in walls or attics that can't be taken out.) This spirit is very old, and nearly dead, as it 'feeds' on deaths, or whatever is released by things dying, soul, spirit, ki, anma, call it what you will, and where it is was once a great house, but it's now a backwater.  However it still has certain abilities, such as the power to take over the body of something that's already dead, freeze people, cast a glamour over its surroundings, and, for some reason, make ghostly animals appear.   Although the spirit has these l33t skillz, it needs some kind of physical presence, and it's still weak so can only manipulate dead things. (The ghost wolves in the forest don't kill people, all the injuries are self-inflicted.) So it asks for volunteers. 

Enter Seifer, the world's favourite minion, who takes it up on the offer, figuring that he can fake it (it's not like he hasn't had experience) and get them both out of there. This seems to work for a time, but then he can't find Quistis and eventually goes to sleep. But this time the spirit has 'digested' its previous meal of crispy fried free range SeeD, enters his dreams to find out that hey, he really isn't one hundred per cent gone on this evil minion thing, and takes over his body (a la _Snatchers)The spirit in Seifer's body goes to visit Quistis, teases her a bit,  lets Seifer say goodbye to her for reasons of its own( mindfuckery, and the author thought it would be cool) It then goes to the main hall where the head is concealed behind the wall, channels more power, and tells Seifer to go get Quistis for a midnight snack. This cuts a little too close to the Rinoa thing for Seifer, who tells it to go to hell and starts fighting it. However at this stage it still has no actual physical body again and this time there aren't any dead guys to use. Seifer quickly realises where it keeps the mojo and that it can't hurt him, at which point the spirit has to do something fast, draws all of its power off the building and takes on a physical form that can mend itself. This, however, returns the mansion to its original form, which has a lot more holes, and releases all the other SeeDs who proceed up to the hall to kick some monster ass.   _

Okay, now I've probably completely lost everyone. It made sense in my head. If I was a good writer I wouldn't have to explain it*sigh*More holes than Swiss cheese.

And yes, I do realise I'm pretty much inviting a let's all play 'find the plot hole' thing.

Ooh, look, I saw one..*takes up magnifying glass and Sherlock Holmes style hat*

kate( It'll be like Swiss Family Robinson, only with more swearing. We'll live like kings! God damn hell ass kings!)


	15. Chapter Fifteen:Resurrection

Chapter Fifteen

_I've been drowned out by the rain,_

_Still I'm wishing I could stay._

_But I'm sorry my old friend,_

_I've got to leave you once again._

_And it might be very hard._

_Can't be more than what we are,_

_Can't be more till it's over._

_Here comes the resurrection,_

_Everybody"s got to die for something,_

_Never thought I'd live to leave you when you go…_

_Moist-Resurrection (edit)_

Seifer wandered through the ruin, his hair and clothes grey with dust and streaked with blood and water and Hyne knew what else. It wasn't until he coughed and spat watery blood onto the snow that he realised it was even light. Dawn, to be precise.

Hyne, when had it got so bright? It seemed like several lifetimes since he'd seen the sun. Maybe it was.

Dust danced in the golden light and merged with the black spots and pinwheels of neon dancing before his vision.

There was something he needed to do.

He looked down at his hand with the blurred detachment of the recently concussed. His gloves were ripped to shreds.

Quistis.

He'd seen the thing throw her into the wall, just before he threw the transmitter, and it exploded.

The transmitter had exploded.

Which meant that she was dead.

It felt like a hand had grabbed his chest and was slowly squeezing. He couldn't breathe.

Seifer glanced around wildly. He could see where the door had been. There were splinters of wood and fragments of carved eroded frame.

Quistis had been to the right of it. Seifer tramped across more rubble. Other figures groaned and stirred. He ignored them. There was a groan from the rubble underneath as the ruin began to settle, shifting into the ground. He ignored that, too.

Just about…here.

He grabbed a chunk of rock and pushed, boots skidding on rock and rising clouds of grainy pale dust.

She had to be here.

Didn't she?

Quistis hadn't deserved to die. The image of her head hitting the rock with a sick crack just before he tried to distract the monster replayed in his mind like a stuck tape.

He lifted a few more pieces of rock, muscles burning.

Nothing.

He cast to the left and found a cracked pair of glasses. His heart leaped in his throat. He shifted another slab of rock to the side, carefully, in case the movement rocked other chunks of architecture.

Quistis was under it.

He worked fast, clearing the area around her body with shaking bloody hands. He didn't dare to check her pulse, to confirm what he already knew was true.

Underneath the rubble, she seemed almost normal. Seifer had been expecting twisted limbs and torn flesh. He'd seen too many explosion victims even as a SeeD trainee to hold any optimistic thoughts. But Quistis just looked like she was asleep. Maybe a bit pale, but hey, it was cold.

He placed his open palm over her face, brushing her lips with his fingers.

Nothing.

She wasn't breathing.

Seifer reached desperately for into the void inside his head, feeling blindly for some kind of magic from the monster and the draw points inside its castle, but it had crumbled.

But he knew someone did have magic. Someone who might help him.

Isak.

It took him a few minutes to find the Galbadian. He was leaning up against a pile of rubble and at first Seifer though he was dead. Blood trickled down his face and pooled in his collarbone. The whole left side of his face seemed to be a redlaced ruin until Isak raised his head and looked up towards Seifer. He shifted his position and Seifer realised it was just his hand, held up to his face. He was sitting like he was hurt.

But he wasn't dead. He had magic. Spells. He could help Quistis.

"You got magic left?"

Isak raised dull eyes. "Sure. For what's it worth. We won, Seifer. We killed it. I'd get out of here if I was you. I"ll give you that. Before any of the others wake up. If they"re gonna."

"It's Quistis. You have to come."

Isak looked at him. He showed no sign of rising, which lit the shortening touch paper of Seifer's temper. "You bastard. If you Don't come you"ll spend the last damn moments of your life regretting you were ever born, you son of a bitch. And that'll be about five fucking seconds." He hauled the smaller man to his feet, nothing distantly how much effort it took.

""I didn't say I wouldn't."

"Right you didn't. Her. Now."

"What's the matter with her?"

Seifer's face was a mask. "She's dead."

Isak said "fuck" quite quietly, and shut his mouth again. He looked very young and pale as a ghost. Long white stripes streaked the front of his uniform where dust had settled on caking blood.

Seifer grabbed the sleeve of Isak's uniform and dragged him after him. The younger soldier's feet caught on rubble as they half walked, half-ran to the boulder. The incongruous remains of a pair of smashed night-vision goggles dangled round Isak's neck, looking like a very high-tech bandanna.

"Try Phoenix Down," he ordered.

"What?" Isak stared at him like he"d just asked for a ferret.

"The spell. It can help to bring people back to life. You got one?"

Well, yeah" Isak said. "It's standard issue. But I"ve never seen it used to revive someone dead. Not, you know, completely .Dying, yeah, but...I dunno. I Don't even know if it can be done. If it should be done..."

"Then you"re about to find out." Seifer had never been let loose with a Phoenix Down, but he knew about the spell, if from reputation yanked Isak past the boulder and pointed at Quistis. "Try it."

Isak knelt by Quistis' body and pressed a hand to her throat. He shook his head.

Seifer scowled. "I'mtelling you, she's dead. I want you to use that to cure her."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't need your fucking pity. Just do it, or I'll break every bone in your body. Including the small ones in your fingers and that's really hard to do."

Together they pulled Quistis up to a sitting position, carefully removing the rubble surrounding her. When Isak pushed the last rock away Seifee saw blood on her head, startlingly red in the dust. There was a lot of it, and her skull looked wrong, soft and swollen. He held her up as Isak whispered a few words and held out his hands. His hands glowed briefly and faded.

It didn't work.

Qustis didn't move. Seifer's exhaustion crashed into him like a wave. He rested his head in his hands. His knuckles stung. It was hard to think, or rather, it was easy to think, but the word wouldn't string together into coherent sentences. He should get the hell out of here, but right now, he just couldn't. He didn't know what he should do.

So he just sat there, like some kind of sappy idiot, trying to get enough energy to do something constructive and failing miserably. Miserably being the operative word.

Isak tapped him on the shoulder."Seifer, I think you should go."

Seifer shook his head. He was tired and fed up and he ached just about everywhere he thought you could ache and lots of places he hadn't thought you could and he wasn't going anywhere, or at least not with any speed. "Isak, just…"

"I think you ought to go _now_."

Seifer heard a click as a weapon cocked behind him. His first thought was, _oh, fuck, not again. _He half-turned, not getting up, and squinted up through the smoke.

There were two people behind him, a woman and a man. Both of them looked uniformly pissed off, probably due to the after-effects of having half a building fall on them. Both of them held weapons.

The man looked oddly familiar in a way Seifer couldn't place. At last he realised he was, of course, the stick-up-his-ass cadet from earlier, only not nearly so assured and looking a bit chewed round the edges.

"You have the right to remain silent," the cadet told Seifer, "but anything that you say may be recorded and later used as evidence in a court of law. You…"

"Fuck off." Seifer snapped.

"Is that a statement?"

"No. It's an order."

Someone grabbed his wrist. Seifer reflexively clasped both hands to break the hold, without thinking that it had come from the wrong direction. He glanced down in shock.

Quistis looked up at him.

Blood clotted black in her hair, she was covered with dust and her spectacles were cracked, but she was alive. She looked like shit, but hell, so did he.

And he could honestly say that he"d never been so glad to see her in his life.

She gave another weak little smile, doubled over and started coughing, hard. Seifer thought it was probably just dust in her lungs, but she probably needed medical attention

"Hey, scarface. You deaf? Hands in the air!" called the female Galbadian.

Seifer gave her the finger. He shot a surreptitious glance at Quistis, who was busy still coughing her guts up. He hoped there weren't any internal injuries the spell had somehow failed to cure and wondered what exactly he could do about it if there was. Behind Quistis' glasses her eyes were scrunched tight shut, but at least she wasn't coughing up any blood, so her lungs, at least, were probably okay for the moment. And she seemed to be moving fine. Stiff, but fine.

Isak rummaged through the rubble. He hauled up Quistis' rucksack, trailing dust and pebbles. He fumbled with the unfamiliar buckles for a second, flipped the top open and wordlessly held out a stainless steel flask. Quistis grabbed it and took a big swallow.

Seifer watched as her coughs began to subside. She squeezed his hand, and then let go to hold the flask more securely. Her voice was a rusty whisper. "Lucky….to get out….of that."

Seifer winced. "Uh, Quistis, There's something you should..."

"You are under arrest!" shouted the woman.

"You died," Seifer told Quistis.

"I _what_?"

"Why is nobody paying attention here?" asked the Galbadian theatrically.

"Scuse me, could you shut the hell up?" Seifer asked without looking at the Galbadians.

They ignored him. "Seifer Almasy? Come with us," said the man.

Seifer raised his eyes and looked from one face to another, weighing up his chances of them not being able to shoot him in the knees before he made it to cover. Not good.

He opened his mouth and then shut it again as another voice cut in. "He isn't doing anything of the sort. This man is already under Balamb Garden jurisdiction as of two days ago. I have witnesses in the village of Yesnaby who will testify to this situation."

It was Quistis. She supported herself on one elbow. Seifer would have said she looked shaky at the best of times, but he knew that expression. He"d seen it many times as a student. It meant that you were doing what she said, right here, right now, no second chances, no stopping. He reached out an arm and she pulled herself up to a sitting posture, wincing. The other soldier didn't appear to be fazed. "I believe you happen to be outnumbered."

"Three against two." Isak said. "I think not."

The woman interrupted him. "Isak, he's a _murderer_.Don't throw your career away. "

Isak's eyes rolled from the soldiers to Quistis, to Seifer and back to the soldiers again.

"Put your hands up. Now." snapped the female Galbadian.

Seifer rolled his eyes. "Leave me the hell alone."

The discussion above his head turned into an argument. The argument seemed to be made up of Quistis and the other guy quoting long passages of the SeeD manual at each other. He supposed he should be more bothered, but he just didn't care. He was more worried about Quistis. She looked pale.

The sky overhead had turned gray in parts, clouds threatening rain. It matched Seifer's mood, which was black, and turning blacker. He guessed he should have felt glad, maybe, that they"d managed to get out of the last mess in one piece, but then why the fuck should he be? There wasn't any way this was going to turn out well.

The Galbadian woman noticed Seifer's lack of attention. She frowned and motioned with the gun for him to stay still.

Seifer yawned in response, partly in contempt but mainly because he was dog-tired, and the morning sun, while it lasted, was warm.

"Don't move," she snapped.

The curt words resurrected Seifer's short temper. "Hell, what does it matter who gets me? The only difference it's going to make is what colour uniform the person flipping the switch"s got on. What do you care?"

Her eyes were pale and cold. "You made Galbadia look like a fool, and now no one wants to hire us. Thanks to you." Her tone was vindictive.

"You did it all by yourself. Bet you were first in line cheering for the sorceress at the start. "

She paled. "I hope you mouth off just as well when you"ve got a rope around your neck. People I know are dead because of you."

Seifer didn't know what to say. He bit his lip in indecision. The woman was jumpy. It would be so damn easy to force her to lose control and well, then there were two ways it could he just looked up at her and shrugged, pretending an indifference he didn't feel. It turned out to be either a very good move or not at all, because the woman's eyes narrowed. "I'll dance on your grave, you murdering bastard."

Seifer mentally gauged the distance to her feet. It would be a gamble, but hey. "Good. Wear a short skirt, it"ll give me something to look forward to."

There was another rumble from the ground. He would have swore he could hear rocks shifting, the splash of rubble into the underground lake behind the cold white outraged silence of her anger."Maybe we should move," he said.

"I don't take suggestions from dead men."

"Fine." He opened his mouth to shout to Quistis that the ground wasn't anywhere near safe and then shut it again as there was a louder shifting of rubble, a long screech of stone on metal or rock and the noises of conversation behind him stopped. The woman swayed. The Galbadian man behind her stretched out an arm in a vain attempt to keep himself upright and shook her off balance. Her gun swayed like a snakecharmer"s flute and pointed down at the ground.

It wasn't even a conscious decision. Seifer's instincts passed straight to his muscles and he was up and running though the gathering dust, ten metres away before his brain kicked in and he thought that maybe he should have stayed where he was. His muscles burned, aching from the after effects of being kicked round a stone floor.

There was the sound of a shot. A puff of dust erupted from the ground half a handspan behind his feet. He heard Quistis shout and decided he really shouldn"t have run, but he didn't even rate his chances if he stopped so he kept going. The ground shifted below his feet, forcing him to turn and blindly dodge again. The movement probably saved his life. A bullet punched a neat hole through the leather of his coat. His breath rasped, ribs aching, throat burning, ears filled with the ebb and flow of his blood.

There was more shouting behind him.

Seifer made the mistake of glancing back. He saw a silhouette neatly silhouetted in the dusty glow, feet apart, arms raised, sighting down the barrel of a gun. The skin between his shoulderblades prickled, expecting a bullet.

The trees loomed invitingly ahead.

He almost made it.

There was a sharp _crack_ from behind him as he dodged for the third time. It felt like someone had just punched him in the back of the leg. He fell untidily, his cheek and hands full of sharp stone splinters, blood in his mouth. It tasted like defeat.

A gaping hole loomed wide in front of him, dark and gaping into nowhere. The smashing sweep of Seifer'ss body as he fell pushed a cascade of stone splinters and debris in front of him like a miniature wave. Just before he reached it he saw the chips go tumbling out into the dark into a cascade of dust that caught the last rays of the sun and made them look like stars. There was a sharp series of clicks as they bounced off other stones in the darkness, followed by a hollow plop as they dropped into water at the bottom.

He fell.

The impact knocked the wind out of him as he slammed into a piece of stone slab in the dark, hands scrabbling uselessly at the sheer grainy surface. He watched the circle of light recede over his head. The world lurched sickeningly as he fell off the end of the stone slab, falling again into nothing as he looked down. He saw a pale circle which even his dazed mind realised was water just before he crashed into it, shattering the reflection into a myriad of tiny glittering pieces.

Seifer's head sank below the surface before reality came back with a sickening slap and he clawed his way up to the air. Reality suggested that he really should get out of the way, fast, before she came back to finish the job. He began to stumble towards the edge of the light, his leg cramping in the cold water.

There was a quiet splash as he bumped into something into soft and unyielding. He reached out cold hands to push it away. The corpse flipped, rolling heavily in the water. Cloth tore under his grip.

Seifer swore and pushed the body away from him, before he turned back to the much more pressing business of surviving. The water was chest-deep and his hands were already starting to turn numb. He wondered for a second if he should try to attract some attention before he froze to death, but then decided caution was the best option. The Galbadians had already demonstrated a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

His questing hands felt smooth jointed stone, remnants of the old wall, and he carefully settled down, lowering himself into the freezing water in a crouch that just exposed his head. His back was straight his and knees bent, his hands pressed flat against the stone. The water washed cold against his exposed throat as he pulled back, sheltering under a slight ledge.

He heard voices.

One of them was female. Seifer had hoped for Quistis,but as the head swung over the hole he recognised the pale closed-off face and the fan of black hair that fell at an angle from the woman"s jaw to dangle round her face.

It was the Galbadian.

The other Galbadian"s head peered over the hole a second later. They conversed in low voices that Seifer strained to hear, punctuated by a series of small splashes as they dislodged stones from the edge of the hole. He closed his eyes and listened.

"..he dead?"

An inaudible answer, then "…something down there…." The words cut off and he heard crunching noises, accompanied by another shower of stones and the sounds of someone coming up from the right. Quistis?

Seifer opened his eyes. Pale blurs of faces blocked the light. There was a hurried movement, and then a blur of shining motion as Rahel raised something up to peer down the hole. Seifer hoped it wasn't a torch.

It wasn't.

There was a deafening staccato rattle as the Galbadian man emptied his clip of ammunition down the hole. Several of the bullets hit the corpse, which jumped and moved, lying face down in a grotesque parody of life. Seifer shrank back against the wall, not daring to move, as bullets hissed through the air, clipping chips off the wall, throwing up spray and ricocheting madly. One buried itself into the mortar a few inches from his head.

Silence, broken by raised voices. Quistis had caught up. The faces pulled away from the hole.

"…if he wasn't dead, he is now."

"…murderer…"

"..better."

_They think I'm dead._

Seifer opened his eyes.

The Galbadian woman's abruptly pulled back from the hole. A second pale oval replaced . Seifer wasn't close enough to read the expression on her face, but her voice was sharp, angry and upset.

The Galbadian beside her scanned the hole. Shrugging, he raised the pistol and put a hole neatly through the back of the corpse"s head. It bobbed, but didn't turn over.

_Quistis, whatever you do don't see me, let her not see me, Hyne_.

He hadn't realised he wanted to live so much, freezing cold and soaking wet in the bowels of a hole in the middle of the forest.

There was shouting, and the two faces disappeared. Seifer held his breath, staring at the corpse.

_Quistis, I never knew you cared._.

His leg had stopped hurting. He he bent to slide a palm down the back of his calf, struggling to keep his head above water. His clothes clung to him, heavy and soaking and wet.

So, not too bad.

His questing fingers traced a shallow groove in the back of his leg, numb from cold. The bullet must have just clipped him.

He'd been lucky, after all.

Quistis rested white-knuckled hands on the lip of the pit. Above her head the storm rolled and rumbled, threatening rain or snow from leaden grey skies.

Dammit.

Seifer might have been an annoying bastard, but he'd made the world a more interesting place. And now he was dead, the first of the orphanage gang to go. It felt even more depressing than how she'd felt the first time, when they thought he"d been executed for kidnapping Deling. This time it was something more than the grief and guilt that came as a matter of course, for going on when someone else had not and knowing that the world was still there after all. She didn't know why.

The kiss burned in her brain like Greek fire, refusing to be quenched.

_Time to pull yourself together, girl._

The Galbadia soldier shrugged and put the pistol back in his belt. Beside him the woman made a small sound of satisfaction. Quistis hated her for a moment, and then squinted at the nametag on the other soldier"s uniform. It read _""_ in trailing grubby thread.

No rank, but hell, she had to outrank him.

"SeeD Grosvenor." Even to Quistis's own ears her voice sounded bitter. "I hope you can explain your actions."

He shrugged, a casual gesture that somehow clashed with the military clothes and bearing. "I don't have to."

"You shot an unarmed man" She stressed the last two words, but knew it wasn't going to work.

Rahel snorted. "Please. My friends are dead because of him and you dare to say that justice hasn't been done? You make me sick." There was no trace in her expression or manner of the SeeD that Quistis had been impressed by in the cell, even liked. If the rain had already started to fall, it would have sizzled on her thin tense shoulders.

Even the uniformed man looked taken aback by her outburst. "Rahel, please. I'm sure we all feel the same way but I'm sure SeeD Trepe is doing her best and we're all very.."

Rahel growled "Go to hell."

Grosvenor appealed to her. " It's not like we wished this to happen. The original plan was always for a trial." He grabbed Rahel by the wrist and pulled her slightly behind him and away from the hole, as if he thought she might jump, or Quistis push her.

"I shall be lodging a formal complaint and investigation." Quistis said, knowing it was a futile effort. By the time they could get a team out with equipment the body would be long gone, swallowed up by the earth as the ruins settled.

"Maybe It's better this way for your…. friend." The significant pause spoke volumes, mostly Suggested For Mature Readers. "Lets go,"Rahel said. Her voice dripped disdain.

Quistis bristled. "Yeah, go and wash your hands of this." She shouted the useless words at the pair"s backs as they turned away. "I suggest steel wool."

They said nothing.

Quistis' coat snapped in the wind and then all at once it began to rain, a thin vicious sleet that whipped her hair round her face.

The hole gaped in front of her, emphatically empty. She turned her face up to the rain, fighting a sense of despair and waste. One of her most promising students a gilded hero, the Lion of Balamb, and one dead like this, forgotten. And who would have thought that it would end up this way, when they were younger, with Seifer all golden brilliant arrogance, and Squall all chilly blackness and reserve?

Not her.

She knelt, staring down the hole. It gaped black and empty in front of her. Nothing moved.

There was a shout from behind her as something large loomed up through the thin rain, trees bending with the wind of its passing. Quistis looked around and saw the transport. On its side was a chipped Balamb insignia.

She was getting on with her life.

But she couldn't make her feet move, and she couldn't tell whether the water running down her face and sleeking her hair was tears or rain.

She turned away, and didn not look back.

Seifer watched the pale oval of her face turn and then flick out of the field of vision.

_Save it your pity for those who need it, Instructor._

He stumbled out of the corner and started to lever hands and feet into crevices, looking for a way up.


	16. Chapter Sixteen:Epilogue

Chapter Sixteen

_And even though the moment passed me by  
I still can't turn away.  
'Cause all the dreams you never thought you'd lose  
Got tossed along the way.  
And letters that you never meant to send  
Get lost or thrown away.  
And now we're grown up orphans  
That never knew their names  
We don't belong to no one  
That's a shame.  
But if you could hide beside me_

_Maybe for a while  
And I won't tell no one your name.  
_Googoo Dolls-Name.

_And as literary convention has it, this story has an epilogue_

_Are you curious about the epilogue?_

Moxy Fruvous:King Of Spain

Seifer had been sitting in the harbourside café for over two hours now, and the waitresses were beginning to get annoyed about the endless bottomless coffee pot refills.

He hadn't even written anything.

How hard could it be?

What was he supposed to say? _Dear Quistis, thanks for saving my life. I really enjoyed the time we spent together in the woods trying to save the world from evil and I just thought you might like to know that I'm not dead._

_Love, Seifer. _

_PS. Please don't tell anybody I'm still alive_.

It all sounded so damn trite.

He rested his elbows on the table and looked around. The place was so damn cute it made him gag. Old lobster pots hung from the ceiling and cheery checked tablecloths of the laminated wipe-clean variety decorated the tables. There were pictures of knots on the wall, done in different colored thread. Knots.

Seifer reckoned he knew a bit about the sea, having being brought up near it, and he sure as hell couldn't remember knots being a big part of what sailors did. What did they do round here, lasso the fucking fish or something?

There were a few other customers, families mostly. The waitresses had seated Seifer in the furthest corner, possibly to stop other customers being too scared to come in, which suited him just fine.

When the man sitting at the next table looked away for a minute, Seifer reached over, stole his beer and walked out of the café, leaving some money on the table.

There was a jetty some distance along the shore. He headed for it, the hems of his frayed trousers catching in the uneven planks of the boardwalk. The stolen beer felt cool and pleasant in his hand. Small droplets of condensation ran down his wrist. They stained the pad of paper in Seifer's hand as he made his way to the end of the jetty and sat down.

After a while, he took his boots off.

A few minutes later, his shirt followed them.

Far behind him there were angry shouts from the café. Someone, somewhere, wanted his beer back. Seifer finished the bottle quickly and dropped it into the water at the end of the jetty. He watched it sink to the bottom. A few fish floated towards it inquisitively.

Five minutes later, a few sheets of paper followed the bottle. Seifer's pad was beginning to look alarmingly thin.

Seifer sighed. He swore half-heartedly. He shifted on the planks, drawing one bare foot up and leaning the pad on the floor. His other foot brushed the water.

It felt strange not to have to watch his back. He was nearly unarmed; nearly, but not quite. Old habits were hard to break.

He rested a hand, still slightly damp from the bottle, on his forehead and started to write.

Some time later he doodled a little fire cross at the bottom, went to sign it and then thought better and inked in "S" instead. Quistis would know who it was from.

The sun felt alien on his back.

It had been ten weeks since he'd left Gen's hut. The old man hadn't been that happy to Seifer back, but he'd promised not to say anything. Besides, there hadn't been anywhere else he could have gone after he'd managed to drag himself out of the hole and retrieve Quistis' half-buried rucksack from the rubble. Gen had even been kind enough to lend him a couple of changes of clothes. He'd even had a bath. They'd played cards in the evening. Seifer had had his ass kicked royally. He'd left quietly, early the next morning, just in case the guy decided to phone Cid on the sly after all.

He was still getting used to being warm enough, all the time. Admittedly, he was still sleeping in the beach hut he'd broken into when he first arrived, but there was hope of work. He'd almost forgotten what a proper bed felt like, though to tell the truth sleeping hadn't been his top priority since that thing had gone rummaging around his head.

But it felt good to be here by the coast, watching the sun gently set beneath the waves. The beach even smelt different from the forests, warm and salty. He stretched, feeling muscles pop and flex in his back, watching boats out on the water.

He'd post the letter in the morning.

Maybe Quistis would even reply.

He wondered just how long it would be before his old self-destructive tendencies. Not long he thought. It never was. But maybe this time it would be just long enough. Long enough to get his train-wreck life out of the sidings and back on track again.

Maybe he'd even get old.

His life stretched out in front of him like the ocean, empty and blue. Sooner or later, decisions were going to have to be made, like just what the hell he was going to _do_, but they could wait. He looked at the sunset-tinted sky and smiled.

Tomorrow looked like it was going to be another beautiful day.


End file.
